Accessibility Prepares Your Website For AI Search

Wooden walkway flanked by lotus ponds leading to a Thai-style pavilion at the resort entrance.

What I learned building Purple's website, and why the work brands have been postponing for compliance might be the same work that decides whether they get found.

Building Purple's website over the past few weeks has surfaced an insight that has shifted how I think about the next decade of digital strategy. The work that goes into making a website accessible is, in practice, the same work that prepares it to be found in AI search.

This is not an abstract claim. It plays out at the level of code, content, and how machines now parse the web.

The parallel

AI systems read websites the way screen readers do. Both rely on semantic HTML, heading hierarchy, alt text, descriptive link names, captions, and schema markup to parse content. The signals that have always made a site usable for a blind user navigating with a screen reader are now the same signals that decide whether a site is readable by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and the AI Overview at the top of Google's results page.

This parallel is not coincidence. It is structural. Both screen readers and AI crawlers are machines that consume text. They do not see design. They do not feel emotion. They follow the architecture beneath the surface.

If your site is accessible, it is already structured for AI to read.

The proof

Google ratified this connection earlier this year with its first formal guide on optimising for generative AI search. The advice reads very close to accessibility standards (WCAG: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines). The headline message was clear. AI search is not a new optimisation discipline. It is the same set of practices that built good websites in the first place, with an added layer of comprehension on top.

The data backs the claim. A study of 10,000 websites found that WCAG-compliant sites get 23% more organic traffic than non-compliant ones. Pages with proper schema markup are 35% more likely to be cited in AI search responses. These are not marginal differences. They are the gap between being a source AI cites and being a source AI ignores.

The boutique hotel

The clearest way to see this in action is to look at where it breaks down.

Take a boutique hotel website. The kind built around a cinematic hero film of suites and ocean views, a one-line tagline like "Where time forgets to move," and a single "Book now" button. For a human visitor who has organically landed on it, this is the brand promise delivered with cinematic confidence.

To AI, it is a near-empty page with a verb and a brand name.

The AI does not watch the video. It does not hear the music. It does not feel the slow pan across an empty beach at golden hour. It follows the text architecture behind the page. If the video has no transcript and the surrounding copy is thin, AI has almost nothing to work with.

Will the hotel still surface in AI search? Probably yes. But not on its own terms.

When someone asks ChatGPT for the best boutique hotels in Phuket, the AI pulls from third parties. The Booking.com listing. Tripadvisor reviews. A Condé Nast feature. The Google Business profile. The hotel gets mentioned, but its description comes from voices outside its control. AI describes it in Booking.com's language, not the hotel's own.

This produces two problems for premium brands.

First, the brand loses control of its narrative. The cinematic film, the careful copywriting on the brochure, the months of brand strategy, none of it enters the conversation. AI builds its summary from whatever was indexed, which is rarely the brand's own carefully crafted positioning.

Second, the brand becomes a commodity. AI ranks properties on attributes that third parties emphasise. Price, location, star rating, amenities. Not the qualitative experience the brand has paid millions to communicate. A less impressive property with a better-written website will sit above a stunning one with a thin page, because AI does not know how beautiful the hotel actually is.

There is also a hidden cost most brands do not budget for. Getting featured in Condé Nast or Travel + Leisure takes years and serious PR investment. Building a strong Tripadvisor presence is its own slow grind. The bigger the brand, the more it can lean on this scaffolding. The smaller the brand, the less it has to fall back on.

So the brand pays twice. Once for the cinematic film. Then again for the visibility gap that film alone cannot close.

The new business reality

This dynamic hits new businesses harder than anyone.

If you are a founder building a company today, you do not have a Tripadvisor history. You do not have a Condé Nast feature. You do not have a UGC ecosystem. You have not had time to build the third-party validation that established brands lean on.

What you have is your website. And the work you put into networking, content, influencer conversations, all of it drives traffic back to one place. Your website is your most controllable asset.

If that asset is half-mute to AI, you are invisible in AI search. No third party is going to bridge the gap because no third party has spoken about you yet.

This flips the conventional wisdom. For large brands, AI search means losing narrative control. For small ones, it is the opportunity to build narrative control from scratch, before the third parties show up. The brand that gets this right has a window that closes once it starts being referenced by others.

Keywords versus accessibility

This is also where the strategy needs to shift.

The old SEO playbook was a matching exercise. Find the search terms your customers used. Repeat them in your title tags, meta descriptions, copy, and image filenames. Build backlinks. Rank.

That playbook still has a place. But AI search is not a matching exercise. It is a comprehension exercise. AI is not trying to figure out which page mentions a keyword the most. It is trying to figure out what each page actually is, and then summarise or cite it accurately.

The signals it relies on to do that are accessibility signals. Alt text describes what the image actually shows. Captions transcribe what the video actually says. Schema markup names what the page actually is, a hotel and not a portfolio site. Semantic HTML shows how topics relate. Descriptive link names tell AI what is on the other side of the link.

Keywords told Google what you wanted to rank for. Accessibility tells AI what your content actually is.

That is the shift. SEO was about gaming the index. AI search rewards comprehension.

What an accessible, AI-ready site actually looks like

The practical work is the same in both directions. If you have an accessibility audit on your roadmap this year, you are already doing the work for AI visibility. If you do not, you are accumulating debt on both fronts.

There are a handful of moves that matter most.

Run a proper accessibility audit. Not a checklist. A walkthrough by someone who understands both WCAG and how AI crawlers actually parse pages. The two perspectives reinforce each other.

Fix your heading hierarchy. H1, H2, H3, in order, used for what they actually mean. Not as styling devices to make text bigger. As structural signals that tell both screen readers and AI crawlers how your content is organised.

Add descriptive alt text to every meaningful image. Not "image_1.jpg." Not keyword stuffing. Honest description of what the image actually shows, in the language people would use to search for what you do. A boutique hotel might write "Wooden walkway flanked by lotus ponds leading to a Thai-style pavilion at the resort entrance." That single line works for a blind user, an AI crawler, and a search engine.

Add captions or transcripts to every video. If your hero film has a voiceover, the transcript needs to be in the page HTML, not just embedded in the video player. AI cannot read the audio. It can read the transcript.

Implement schema markup on every page that has a clear type. A hotel page should have Hotel schema. A product page should have Product schema. A team member should have Person schema. This is not decoration. It is how AI confirms what your page is for.

Use descriptive link text. "Read our suite descriptions" instead of "Click here." "Book a consultation" instead of "Learn more." Both screen reader users and AI benefit from knowing where a link goes before clicking it.

Make sure your content renders server-side. AI crawlers often do not execute JavaScript. If your important content only appears after a client-side render, it is effectively invisible to AI.

Accessibility as design discipline

The bigger reframe is this.

Accessibility is not a compliance exercise. It is a design discipline that forces clarity. It removes the visual-only design choices that look good but communicate nothing. The icon-only button with no label. The decorative image with no alt text. The link that says "click here." The hero video that carries the entire brand message with no text equivalent.

It demands that every element on a page answer one question. Is this clear enough that anyone can use it?

That question, asked of every element, produces a website that works for a blind user navigating with a screen reader, a voice assistant pulling content for a smart speaker, an AI crawler indexing for citation, a tired commuter scanning between meetings, a multi-tasker with too many tabs open, anyone reading on a small screen, anyone with patchy bandwidth.

The same question, asked of every brand decision, produces communication that travels. Across audiences. Across devices. Across machines.

Closing thought

A Forbes piece from late 2025 put it well. AI search success is not new technology. It is timeless principles of clear communication, semantic structure, and accessible design.

The companies that win in AI search will not be the ones that bolt on a new optimisation layer. They will be the ones that recognise the layer was already there, waiting, in the accessibility work most of them have been postponing for years.

If you are in build or audit phase on your website this year, this is the moment to fold accessibility and AI readiness into one piece of work. Same investment. Two outcomes. Better experience for users. Better visibility for your brand.

If you want to exchange ideas on what that actually looks like in practice, I am happy to chat. Plenty to share from the process so far.