How AI sees your site.

What is left when the design is gone.

When an AI tool or a search engine opens a page, it does not look at it the way a person does. It takes the page's source, the code the browser uses to build what you see, and pulls the text out of it. Colours, fonts, animations and layout mostly fall away. What is left are the words, headings, lists, links, picture descriptions and data written for machines.

That is why a lot of what a person sees on a page, a machine does not. A menu published as a photograph is, to AI, just an image, at best with a file name. Prices typed into a graphic, opening hours in an Instagram picture, an address that exists only as a pin on a map: a person reads all that in a moment, while a machine reads it poorly or not at all.

The same goes for content that only appears once a script runs on the page or the visitor taps something. Some tools run scripts and some do not. Text that is in the page from the very first moment will be read by all of them.

Three layers AI reads.

On a site I build, AI finds three layers of the same facts, from the widest to the shortest:

• Plain text. Everything written on the page, arranged in proper headings, paragraphs and lists, with nothing important hidden in pictures. Everyone reads this layer: search engines, AI assistants and the screen readers that blind and partially sighted people use.
• Structured data. A short record in an agreed format, invisible to visitors: who you are, where you are, when you are open, what the number is, what you offer and what the common questions are. A machine reads it without guessing, because every item has its own name.
• An llms.txt file. A plain-text summary of the whole site in one place, written for language models. It sits beside the site, and anyone can open it.

For a konoba, the structured record would say roughly this: the type is restaurant, the name is such-and-such, the address is this, it is open from this hour to that, it takes bookings on this number, the cuisine is Dalmatian. A visitor sees all that on the page anyway, but from the record a machine does not have to guess which figure is the phone number and which is a price.

The llms.txt file is a proposal, not a rule everyone follows. Some tools read it, some do not, and nobody outside knows how much weight each gives it. I add it because it costs nothing and does no harm, and a tool that reads it gets an accurate summary instead of a guess. The real foundation is still the first two layers.

The button that shows it.

On sorich.hr there is a button, “This page through AI's eyes”: on the home page, on the SEO and AI visibility page and here, just below. Press it and the same page shows itself as a machine reads it, in three tabs: the text, the structured data and the file for AI. It is not a special version made for display, but the text and data of this very page. You do not need to know anything about code to see the difference.

Try it on this article. You will see that headings stay headings and lists stay lists, and that the structured data says what this page is and who is behind it. Then imagine your own site in that form. Is anything left of the menu? Are the opening hours written in words anywhere? Does the machine know which town you are in?

What it means for your business.

For a konoba, an apartment or a taxi the rule is simple: everything important has to exist as text. The menu as text with prices and allergens, not as a photograph; there is more in the article on the digital menu. Opening hours and the address in words, not only on a map. Common questions with answers. The same facts in a structured record. Then AI, when someone asks about you, has something to read, and how it chooses whom to recommend from that is covered in the article on how AI chooses.

The same helps people too. A site a machine reads well is usually a site a screen reader reads well, and a site that opens faster, because there are no heavy pictures with text inside them. Good copy is not written once for AI and again for people.

None of this guarantees that AI will recommend you. It only makes sure that what is written about you can be read by a machine.