Our thinking about HubSpot, AI, & removing silo'ed data

You've made your website AI-readable. Your robots.txt allows AI crawlers. Your pages are available as clean markdown. But AI systems still aren't citing you. The infrastructure gets your content in front of AI agents. The structure of your content determines whether they actually use it. This article covers how to write and format content that AI systems can confidently extract, cite, and include in their answers.

AI systems are becoming primary discovery channels. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Google AI Overviews, and Gemini now answer hundreds of millions of queries every day. When they answer a question that your content could address, they make a retrieval decision: which sources should inform this answer, and which should be cited? If your website isn't AI-readable, you're invisible to a growing share of your audience. And the gap between AI-readable and AI-invisible is widening fast. This guide covers everything you need to do to make your website visible to AI systems - from the format

robots.txt gives you a binary choice: allow an AI crawler to access your content, or block it entirely. But what if you want something in between? What if you want AI systems to cite your content in search results but not use it for model training? What if you want AI agents to read your public marketing pages but restrict access to your premium content? robots.txt can't express these distinctions. Content Signals can. What Content Signals are Content Signals is a response header standard that lets you declare how AI systems may use

If you've heard about making your website AI-readable, you've probably encountered llms.txt. It's one of those things that sounds technical but is actually straightforward - and it's something every website should have in place right now. This article explains what llms.txt is, what it looks like, how to create one, and where it fits in the broader AI readability stack. The one-line explanation llms.txt is a markdown file at your website's root that gives AI systems a curated table of contents for your site. It tells them who you are, what your site contains, and where to

If you work in marketing, content, or business, you may have heard that AI systems prefer markdown. But what does that actually mean? What is markdown, why do large language models prefer it, and what does it look like in practice? This article explains markdown from the ground up - no developer background required - and makes the case for why it's the most important format shift happening in web content today. What markdown actually is Markdown is a lightweight text formatting language created by John Gruber in 2004. It uses simple characters to indicate structure:

You've published great content. Maybe you've even set up llms.txt and per-page .md files. But none of that matters if your robots.txt is blocking the AI agents that want to consume it. Many websites are invisible to AI search - not because their content is poor, but because their robots.txt rules inadvertently shut the door. This article walks you through auditing and fixing it. The problem you don't know you have robots.txt has been around since 1994. It tells web crawlers what

If you've set up an llms.txt file, you've given AI systems a table of contents for your site. That's a good start. But the table of contents is not the book. Per-page .md files are the book. They deliver the full content of every page on your site in clean, structured, token-efficient markdown - and they're the single most impactful thing you can do to make your website AI-readable. The map vs the territory llms.txt is a static file that tells AI agents what your site contains and

You've done the work. You've set up llms.txt. You've created per-page .md files. You've audited your robots.txt. Your content is clean, structured, and AI-readable. But how do you know if any of it is working? How do you know which pages ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity have actually consumed? How do you know whether AI systems are reading your content at all? This is the biggest unsolved problem in

Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) is the practice of making your website's content discoverable, extractable, and citable by AI systems - including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Google AI Overviews, and Gemini. Unlike traditional SEO, which optimises for position in a list of search results, AEO optimises for inclusion in the AI's synthesised answer. The distinction matters because AI search is binary: you're either part of the answer or you're invisible. There is no page two. Gartner projected that search engine query volume would drop 25% by 2026 due to AI chatbots. HubSpot's