Semantic HTML is the language of machine comprehension. AI models parse your HTML structure to understand content hierarchy, authorship, and topical relevance. Worth 13% of your AEO score, it bridges the gap between human-readable design and machine-readable meaning.
Every page should have exactly one H1. Subheadings should follow a logical nesting: H2 for sections, H3 for subsections.
Why AI cares: AI models use heading hierarchy as a table of contents. Broken hierarchy creates a fragmented understanding of your content structure.
Include og:title, og:description, og:image, og:url, and og:type on every page.
Why AI cares: Open Graph is the de facto standard for how AI agents parse shared content identity. Missing OG tags = degraded social and AI metadata.
Each page title should be unique, descriptive, and between 50–60 characters. Format: "Page Name | Brand Name".
Why AI cares: AI models use page titles as primary signals for what a page is about. Vague titles produce vague citations.
Every public page should have a meta description of 120–160 characters that summarizes the page content.
Why AI cares: Meta descriptions are one of the most reliable content signals for AI models — they are concise, author-controlled, and semantically dense.
Use <main>, <article>, <section>, <nav>, <aside>, <header>, <footer> instead of generic <div> wrappers.
Why AI cares: Semantic elements are unambiguous signals about content type and role. AI models can confidently extract main content from <article> vs. a generic div.
Every <img> element should have an alt attribute with a description of the image content.
Why AI cares: Multimodal AI models read alt text to understand visual content. Meaningful alt text extends your content's semantic reach.
Add datePublished and dateModified to Article and BlogPosting schema, and to visible page metadata.
Why AI cares: AI models prioritize recent content. Date signals help them rank your content by freshness and avoid citing outdated information.
For blog posts and guides, add a Person schema for the author including name, url, and sameAs links to their professional profiles.
Why AI cares: Google's EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust) signals are increasingly used by AI models to weight content credibility.
Blog posts and guides should display the author's name and role visibly near the title.
Why AI cares: Visible author attribution is an EEAT signal that AI models read alongside schema markup. Both are needed for full credibility.
The <html> element should have a lang attribute matching your content language: <html lang="en">.
Why AI cares: Language declaration prevents AI models from misidentifying your content's language and routing it to wrong locale responses.
EEAT stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness — Google's framework for evaluating content quality. AI models increasingly inherit these signals to decide which sources to cite. Author bylines, Person schema, and organizational credentials all contribute to your EEAT score.
Yes. AI models that crawl the web parse HTML structure to distinguish navigation from main content, ads from editorial, and headings from body text. Sites using semantic elements consistently produce cleaner content extraction — leading to more accurate citations.
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