Your HTML Is Lying to AI Agents

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 01:13:00 -0400

Your site has two versions. The first is the rendered page: sidebar on the left, article on the right, everything in its place. The second is what machines read — the raw HTML, in source order, before CSS gets involved. On most personal blogs, that second version leads with navigation, tag clouds, and category lists before it reaches a word of the article. That’s the version every AI agent, crawler, and screen reader encounters first.

This post argues that HTML is no longer just presentation scaffolding — it’s a machine-facing interface, and most of us are still designing it as if only browsers matter. The fix is three practical changes: reordering the DOM so content leads, generating llms.txt so agents can orient to your site, and publishing plain text versions of every post so there’s nothing to strip. None require a new framework. All take an afternoon.

If an agent read your site top to bottom in raw HTML, what would it think matters most?

Html on Corey Daley

Your HTML Is Lying to AI Agents