This page reads itself · July 2026 · Robert Haase
I tried to see my own website the way a machine sees it. The result is below: on the left, a page as a human knows it. On the right, what a machine gets from it. None of it is mocked up, the apparatus opens the real page and reads its source.
Hover a line on the right and the matching spot on the left lights up. And the other way round. Some lines never light up, because the other side simply never receives them. Those spots are what this is about.
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both sides one side only
Five views, five ways of reading. Whether a page is machine-readable depends on which machine is reading.
The most important point: the big US assistants do not run JavaScript on a direct fetch. In one test a decoy phone number sat in the source code and the real one only appeared via script. ChatGPT and Claude reported the decoy. Three tests since late 2025 show the same picture; all three are single measurements. The route via a search index does render. Only the direct fetch does not.
Everything happens in the browser, no server.
On the left sits the real page, loaded in a frame. The apparatus reads its source, its structured data, and the llms.txt, and sets them against the five views. The tree and HTML views are reproductions of the formats used by Playwright and Stagehand, the most common tools browser agents are built with. The mapping between left and right comes from text matching and is fuzzy at the edges. To verify: open the source, find the same data.
An element without a name does not exist for an agent.
Google says it plainly: agents rely on the accessibility tree, the same tree screen readers use. Since spring 2026, Lighthouse, Google's website testing tool, checks it in a category of its own. A button that consists only of an icon has no name in this tree. The agent can neither see it nor use it.
This is not an edge case. A survey of one million home pages found empty buttons on 30.6 percent, and on half of them form fields lack labels. The average website reads to an agent like a half-labelled form.
Four claims circulate on this topic. None is as solid as it sounds.
Structure beats pixels? The studies disagree: sometimes the text-based variant wins clearly, sometimes the one with screenshots. What is certain is that the serious agent tools work through structure, not through screenshots.
Accessibility helps agents? The number cited everywhere for this, success falling from 78 to 42 percent, comes from a study that did not change a single website. It took the mouse away from the agent. A real comparison of accessible versus inaccessible sites does not exist to this day; I am building exactly that comparison alongside this page. The result will appear here, whichever way it turns out. The link is plausible already: a first experiment with two versions of the same page, 89 versus 49 percent success, points that way. But it is a prototype.
Structured data creates visibility? The cleanest test so far compared almost 2,000 pages after they added JSON-LD with matched control pages. Result: no measurable effect in ChatGPT and Google's AI mode, a slightly negative one in AI Overviews. I keep the markup anyway, because it keeps the foundation clean. I do not promise myself an effect from it.
There are rules everyone follows? Google, OpenAI, Perplexity, and Meta explicitly exempt their user-triggered fetches from robots.txt; Anthropic is the exception. Blocking AI crawlers blocks training and search. The agents keep running. And the standard meant to settle this has been stuck in a working group for over a year.
And the promised answer on llms.txt: it is here because it exists. 97 percent of these files get not a single request, server logs across 137,000 domains show. The format was invented for tool documentation, not for visibility. Where it demonstrably works, it saves agents time. Nothing more.
This website is the easiest case there is.
Five pages, static, no CMS, a single script. On a grown brand site with a tag manager, a consent layer, and three agencies involved, the right-hand column would look different. What is handcraft here becomes a question of ownership and process there.
And clean structure is only the entry ticket. My own measurements show both sides: ask about me, and this website is the primary source. Ask whom to hire for this topic, and my name does not come up. Between those two results lies no technical problem. What lies there is what third parties write.
My own terms at a glance: To the overview → · Context: Machine Readable Brands