So you’re asking yourself, “How can I improve my site’s visibility in AI tools like ChatGPT?” Making your website accessible is a great place to start.
Web accessibility used to be about supporting people by building websites that were compatible with assistive technology. Now, those same practices are communicating better with Ai tools and improving performance.
With the rise of AI-generated answers, semantic structure and WCAG 2.2 best practices are not just helpful for those using screen readers. They are making your website easier for AI to understand, summarize, and rank.
In other words, the same practices that make your site “Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust” (WCAG AA standard) also make it more legible for AI. And that means accessible websites have an edge in search visibility.
Let’s unpack how this works.
Your website’s code is more than just a delivery system. It is a signal system. It tells browsers, bots, screen readers, and now AI agents how to interpret your content. The more semantic clarity your site has, the easier it is for all of them to understand what you do, why it matters, and how it contextually relates to an ai search query.
WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) is a global standard created by the W3C to ensure websites are usable by people with disabilities; it defines levels of accessibility from A (minimum) to AAA (most inclusive), and was founded to promote equal access to digital content regardless of ability.
Semantic HTML uses meaningful tags like <nav> for navigation or <article> for content that describe the role of each part of your site. This helps both screen readers and AI interpret your content more accurately than if your layout relies solely on generic boxes and styling.
Semantic tags like <header>, <main>, and <article> help assistive technologies understand page flow. They also help search engines and AI models classify and contextualize your content more accurately. This leads to stronger SEO performance in AI-driven search.
Most marketing professionals know what an <alt> tag is. If you don’t know, it’s called an ‘alt tag’ which is short for ‘Alternative text’ and it is applied to an image on your website that deserves a description other than ‘image’ when a screen reader, which read the alt text aloud.
An ARIA label (“aria-label") is an HTML attribute used to provide an accessible name or description for an element—especially when that element doesn’t have visible text—so screen readers can accurately describe its purpose to users with visual impairments.
For example, a button with only an icon can use aria-label="Close" to ensure assistive technologies understand what it does.
Most of today’s AI tools, including summarizers and voice assistants, depend on semantic cues to extract meaningful responses to conversational queries. If your site is a tangle of <div>s and <span>s, your content is nearly impossible for technology to contextualize.
So if you’re wondering how to future-proof your site’s visibility, start by asking how accessible your structure is.
You’ve probably seen tools that promise “instant WCAG compliance” or “AI-powered accessibility” by installing a single line of code. The reality? They’re band-aids, not solutions. And in some cases, they do more harm than good.
While, there are many digital tools, plugins, and widgets used for flagging low-hanging WCAG issues or adapting your website to be more accessible, they only catch about a third of what real users or human systems will notice. A 2023 WebAIM study of the top 1 million homepages found that 96.3% had detectable WCAG failures despite widespread use of automated testing.
This tells us that although there’s modest year-over-year improvement, the web remains far from compliant with key accessibility standards. The majority of detectable violations are avoidable—often involving aspects like contrast, image text alternatives, and proper form labeling
Further, tools, overlays and scans do not understand nuance, and they definitely do not translate your brand voice or image descriptions the way you would. So while they may check a box, they could be more performative than actually useful. If your branding is important to you, this should motivate you to stop using plug-ins and ensure that your developers are WCAG compliant.
So before you turn to an overlay, ask yourself whether it’s clarity or compliance you’re after. When it comes to improving your website’s search visibility we still recommend hiring a human team that uses accessibility tools to conduct the most thorough audits. Find a web agency with deep roots in accessibility and a workflow that uses machine checks alongside human review.
If you’re using tools like Lighthouse, Userway, or other third party plugins, they may be somewhat useful for users, but they likely won’t do anything to improve your search results. Overlays rarely deliver compliance and clarity, and the most successful websites aim for both if you want to make your website work for humans and ai search results.
If you still think SEO is all about keywords and backlinks, you are working off a 2012 playbook. Many of the most powerful visibility signals your brand needs in 2025 come directly from accessibility best practices.
In our experience, most brands think of web accessibility as a “nice to have.” Some values-driven organizations consider it essential as part of their ethos to make content available to everyone, regardless of ability. Thank you, to those who are ahead of the curve because it’s the right thing to do. (Finally, doing the right thing is paying off!)
For those of you who haven’t yet seen the value in building a more accessible web, consider this; If AI cannot understand what your page is about, it will not cite it, summarize it, or serve it up in response to search queries.
While web accessibility might have been perceived as ‘going the extra mile’ in the past, it is now undeniably the best roadmap for staying ahead as users change how they search because Ai operates much like the assistive technology values-driven coding has served in the past.
If you’re wondering where to get started, go to your home page and right-click, and select ‘inspect element’ from the menu. From there, you’ll be able to see the code Ai search tools see, and look for the following:
<H1> tag. Strong accessibility does not happen at the end of a build. It is part of how you design, write, and develop from the beginning. And when you embed it early, it pays off everywhere, across UX, SEO, and AI-based discovery.
If you want your site to show up in AI search results and be usable by real people, build like this:
Tab on your keyboard and try navigating your homepage without a mouse. Can you clearly see which element is in focus, and reach all interactive components? If not, your site likely fails WCAG’s Operable success criteria.Following WCAG 2.2 Level AA standards doesn’t just make your content perceivable and operable—it now improves how clearly AI can classify and rank your pages.
If you haven’t been making your site accessible for human users, AI will have a more challenging time interpreting it as well. And that means your content may never show up in AI-driven search results.
We do not yet know how technologies like vibe coding will influence this in the future. But here is what we do know now. If you are using drag-and-drop site builders like Wix or Squarespace, which prioritize design but overload your codebase with nested <div>s and inline styles, your site might be completely unfindable by AI. It is not that AI models cannot read your content. It is that they will not be confident which content carries weight.
Going forward, all of your digital output should be optimized to be interpreted by Ai, and web accessibility standards are the absolute best place to look for guidance on how to do that.
Unstructured example:
Each question and answer is a randomly styled paragraph inside a text box. There are no headings, no <section> or <dl> tags, and no semantic markers. AI sees a wall of text and doesn’t know which answers go with which questions—so it’s less likely to extract or rank them.
Structured example:
Each question is a proper heading (<h3>), with the answer in a paragraph directly below. The whole page is wrapped in a <section> with a clear ARIA label. AI can now easily determine what the page is about, what content is related, and how to present it back to a user in a summarized format.
Which do you think will command more authority in AI results? Read more in another recent post we made about the power of FAQ pages right now.
At Hard Refresh, we don’t separate accessibility from performance. They go hand in hand. We’ve always said accessible websites work better—for everyone. Now, AI is proving us right.
Our clients aren’t just seeing stronger usability metrics. They’re earning better visibility across platforms because their websites are built with structure, intent, and clarity.
If your site isn’t readable by assistive tech, its AI search performance may be challenged—the same way keyword stuffing once worked, then became penalized. But the fix isn’t flashy or expensive. It’s thoughtful structure, tested workflows, and digital clarity built by humans who use AI tools wisely.
And remember, always put real humans first. Just like SEO practices evolved as Google’s algorithm updated over the years, Ai will likely do the same. Don’t get caught in gaming a new system, continue to put your users first and partner with a digital strategy team that can make your user-centered content compatible with this new search technology.
Things will change. They always do. But right now, we’re seeing huge value for the clients who prioritized accessibility before they “had to.”
We build for that. You can, and should, too.