Last week, we discussed the importance of optimizing your digital assets for AI. Today, we’ll explain how you can improve your institutional directory listing, lab website, or any similar sites hosted on a .edu domain to enhance AI visibility and comprehension. Websites providing authoritative, straightforward information are often among the first sources used by LLMs for factual summaries.

We start here because sites with .edu domains are considered very high-trust, so you want to make the most of those. Here’s how to do that:

1. Check that your pages are accessible to AI crawlers (see below).

2. Ensure that content is clear, structured, and specific; organized formatting will help LLMs parse text effectively.

3. Add a 2-3 sentence plain-language overview at the top of each page.

4. Highlight your recent work, and link strategically to your LinkedIn, Google Scholar, ORCID, other webpages, or other relevant profiles. Give the links descriptive names like ‘Google Scholar Profile’ rather than using ‘see our publications here.’

5. Provide updates with dates attached to signal freshness and relevance of your content (e.g., ‘Last updated: August 2025).

6. Set a reminder to update your site(s) in 6 months.

To do this effectively, it’s helpful to understand a bit about how LLMs gather information. AI web crawlers, such as those used by ChatGPT, visit webpages, extract text, images, and data, and feed it into a massive database that is organized into AI training pipelines. In some cases, web crawlers might might actively search your website (rather than rely on training data) to access fresh info – this is what happens when you ask ChatGPT to search the web, for instance. If you want AI to register your presence and understand your work, your content must be accessible to these bots.

Some AI crawlers don’t execute client-side JavaScript and only index what’s present in the initial HTML. To maximize visibility, use static HTML or server-side rendering so your bio and research summary appear in the page source. (You can check via View Page Source—if your actual text appears there, you’re set.) If what comes up does not contain the actual copy/content but rather looks like a bunch of links, that means the page is dynamic. To see an example of a dynamic page, choose View Page Source for LinkedIn. The good news is that your .edu sites will almost certainly use static HTML. However, it’s important to understand this distinction.

Here's an important point: what makes your web assets AI-friendly is also what makes them human-friendly. Potential funders, collaborators or students, will likely spend just 30 seconds scanning your webpage or directory listing.

Generally, these are the three principles to follow moving forward for both AI and humans:

• Structuring sites clearly will promote their credibility.

• Linking your sites to each other and ensuring consistency of information will reinforce your online identity.

• Updating sites frequently will maintain their relevance.

Try to find some time to make these quick fixes and updates this week. Next week, we’ll get into how to optimize your Google Scholar and ORCID so that you can be both found and correctly known in the age of AI.

Why flexibility wins in research funding

In this quick video, I share why staying flexible with your funding strategy can support your success. Even if you’ve mapped out where you think you’ll apply, sometimes the best opportunities come from unexpected directions. Here's how to recognize those moments and what to do when they happen.

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Check out our storefront where you can access our free Unlocking DOD Funding for University Researchers course and other resources, including for faculty applicants.

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