Your website is not only for people, it's read by search crawlers, assistive tech, and an ever growing set of AI agents that summarise, cite, or train on what they find. The mistake we keep seeing on client estates is treating those as separate projects: an SEO pass in marketing, an accessibility checklist before go-live.
Take care of your rendered HTML so it is structured, visible, and intentional. It is a foundation of your SEO, accessibility, and agent-readiness.
People, search, and agents
- Accessibility has a clear bar. WCAG 2.2 Level AA is the working standard most UK buyers ask for. For public-sector and education bodies, the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) Accessibility Regulations 2018 turn that into a legal conformity story.
- Technical SEO still rests on Google's basics: crawlable URLs, honest titles and canonicals, useful structured Schema.org data, and pages that actually render the content your users care about. Google Search Central is still the source of truth for how crawlers interpret that.
- Social previews are fundamental - Open Graph and card meta decide what appears when someone pastes a link into LinkedIn, Slack, or Messages. This is all part of SEO delivery and your brand's digital footprint.
- Agent readability is newer, but the pattern is familiar. Named bots in robots.txt (training versus citation versus user-fetch), optional briefing files such as llms.txt, and enough server-rendered text that a fetcher does not hit an empty site. None of that replaces search rankings or WCAG conformance. But it does decide how engines and assistants quote the pages, and whether you meant to allow training crawlers at all.
The real SEO problem
Across member platforms, education schemes, and product sites we audit - including SCONUL Access under SEO review and accessibility compliance - the failures are rarely exotic:
- Contrast that only fails in one theme - Dark mode passes; light mode fails - buttons, consent links, status badges.
- Strong brand messages, weak machine signals - Titles and schema look fine on a few hub pages, then lose quality and consistency across the sitemap. Or the reverse: SEO hygiene is clean, but every AI bot inherits a blanket User-agent: * with no explicit training-versus-citation policy.
- Missing or decorative llms.txt - Either absent, or just a dump of every URL instead of a curated briefing to services, proof, and contact.
- SSR gaps - Content that only appears after client JavaScript runs is invisible to many crawlers and fetchers, and often harder for assistive tech when names and structure are missing.
- Scores as certificates - Automation (axe-core, rendered SEO checks, Lighthouse) is excellent for readiness. It typically catches a large share of issues. Keyboard paths, focus order, media alternatives, and Search Console coverage still need guided and manual work.
How we solve your SEO
We treat SEO, accessibility, agent-readiness, social previews and server-side rendering as the foundations of an effective SEO audit.
- Rendered audits, not source-only guesses - Pages are collected in a real browser so titles, meta, schema, contrast, names, and landmarks match what users and bots actually get.
- Defined catalogues and honest scores - Technical SEO (including social footprints and separate agent-readiness breakdowns) and WCAG 2.2 AA checks produce developer detail plus plain-language client summaries.
- Theme and viewport matrices - Light/dark (or high-contrast) themes are first-class, where shared colours and assets that fail in light mode show up before a public-sector review does.
- Policy before fashion - For agents we ask the product question first: allow citation, restrict training, or the reverse? Then we write named User-agent rules and, where it helps, an llms.txt that points at the pages you want quoted.
- Fix and revisit - Findings are resolved, and regular reviews keep the site in shape. Our clients get a chronological view of their digital landscape and how it changes over time.
If you want to get started on your own and take control of that landscape, give Arc a try. It is the workspace we built to run these audits, keep the scores honest, and show what changed over time.