Google’s John Mueller and Martin Splitt have suggested caution against using flagging as an AI search optimization solution, arguing that it unnecessarily complicates the simplistic.
Markdown is a terrible user experience
The first point Google’s Martin Splitt touched on is that positioning itself may not be a good user experience. He noted that HTML layouts offer the opportunity to create a great user experience with visually appealing layouts and colors, something that markdown doesn’t support.
Martin explained:
“And I mean, one more thing for users, you can’t just publish a set of Markdown documents because A, we like colors and images and things like flow in a good structure and Markdown by definition, unless you put structure in it, it doesn’t support it. And Markdown doesn’t support structures directly.
So you’re going to have to have some kind of machine to… You’re basically recreating the browser. You recreate the HTML partition at the end. So you can use HTML parsing because as you say, that has been around, tried and tested for decades at this point. “
Markdown Creates Double Work
Another point Martin made is that using LLM markdown while creating a separate HTML version for users doubles the amount of work and complicates the act of web publishing, which is the opposite of what SEOs and publishers should be doing: simplifying the act of web publishing.
Martin continued:
“One thing is that you would repeat things if you would admit, like, users don’t want Markdown. They want a full website. Then I create a version only for LLMs, then it’s like doing double work or double the work, no?”
John Mueller agreed and expanded on the topic by saying that he understands where people are coming from about simplifying the process of publishing content because some HTML pages can render poorly.
Mueller added:
“Yes, I think that’s always bad on the web. And I understand where these ideas come from because a lot of web pages are structurally bad and difficult to use. And it’s tempting to say that, well, users can’t see this complicated, complicated page, and the automatic programs, it should be easy. You just have to give them the information they need.”
What they did not say but what was said in what they were talking about is that people evolved to prioritize visual information; it is the dominant way people see the world.
According to scientists:
“… a part of the human brain is devoted directly or indirectly to vision …”
That means that communication with attractive images and buildings can be beneficial in conveying a message.
Similar Versions of Content
Finally, both Mueller and Splitt cautioned against having identical versions of content because it unnecessarily complicates the act of publishing. Furthermore, because AI won’t email you to tell you that the markup version of a web page is broken (the way a user might if your HTML is broken), it’s possible for the machine-facing version of the content to remain in a broken state for weeks or more without the site owner catching on.
Mueller began this part of the interview:
“The bottom line is, once you have these parallel versions of your content, everything becomes very difficult. You have to keep those many versions. You have to make sure that there is nothing broken in the version that they don’t see, because users may complain to you if your page doesn’t load properly. But if the LLM version of the page doesn’t load properly, no user will tell you that something is broken.
And many of these automatic systems, they may not even notice that something is wrong because they see, it’s like, there is some text here, it must be what they want us to point to.”
Martin Splitt agreed:
“Yeah, I think we learned that lesson with dynamic translation, which was a good stopgap solution. But we found that doing it multiple times caused a lot of problems and it was really hard to debug because of this duality of two different versions. Yeah, that’s not right.”
The taker
John Mueller and Martin Splitt of Google warned against the use of markdown as a separate AI-optimized version of the website, making the point that publishers are better off optimizing their existing HTML pages than creating similar AI versions of the content.
- Google says that AI SEO branding may not be ideal because it may lead to problems related to publishing related sets of content, which adds complexity without corresponding benefits.
- Adaptive content development is difficult to fix because failures in AI-facing versions may go unnoticed for a long time, unlike broken user-facing pages.
- Markdown content for both users and AI may not present the best user experience. Although they didn’t say it, user experience is a real factor related to quality, both directly and indirectly.
- HTML provides significant usability benefits through layout, navigation, colors, and graphics, which help users consume information more efficiently than raw markup.
- Google compares publishing interactive content to dynamic rendering, suggesting that past efforts to maintain machine-optimized versions often created more problems than they solved.
Listen to the search without the record here, starting around the 14-minute mark:
Featured image by Shutterstock/Krakenimages.com
