Make pages easy to quote
What assistants can actually read, and how to write pages they can lift a clear answer from.
3 guides, last updated
Can AI crawlers see JavaScript content?
2 min readMostly no. A 2024 study of crawler traffic by Vercel and MERJ found that OpenAI's crawlers, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Meta's crawler, Bytespider and CCBot download JavaScript files but don't execute them. Google's crawlers, which Gemini also uses, and Applebot do render JavaScript.
What is llms.txt, and do you need one?
2 min readLlms.txt is an optional Markdown file at the root of your site that summarizes what the site is and links to its most useful pages. Nothing you can measure today depends on it. It's cheap to add, so add a short one and move on.
Writing pages AI assistants can quote
2 min readPut a direct answer to the page's main question in the first few sentences, give each section a heading that says what it answers, and back claims with specifics you can stand behind. That's ordinary good writing, and it's what assistants quote.