Machine-Readable Formatting

So Microsoft just published an article called Optimising Your content for inclusion in AI Search answers, and it actually has some really good information about how to get recommended by large language models like ChatGPT. So I figure we could go through some of the big ones.

This is what I love about Microsoft, by the way. They're way more transparent about how to rank in search engines than Google ever has been.

For example, Microsoft shared the fact that user behaviour factors into their ranking algorithm years before Google was forced to reveal that from the DOJ Trials. Most of the article that Microsoft put out is the same thing that SEO's have been saying for years, but it's still very valuable information.

This is stuff like having clear titles using proper heading structure. They also confirmed a lot of our early findings about what works in AI Search.

Specifically, these are things like semantic chunking, making sure every section or every chunk of your article is self contained...

Dash. Whether or not the em dash is confusing the machines, or the machines are just labeling it as AI content because of the em dash, I do think it's a good idea to be replacing all the em dashes in your content, at least for now.

They also confirmed that machines have a hard time finding information that's hidden in tabs. This is something that's been shown a few times from tests over the years.

You wanna make sure all important content is visible on the page. They also encourage you to use question and answer format, which aligns with what pretty much every SEO is doing right now.

In fact, typically when I ask SEOs what they're doing to optimize for AI, the only thing they say is adding more epic use.