Plain answers, near the top
The four questions are universal
Across product pages, service pages, software documentation, professional bios, and small-business landing pages, the same four questions recur. What is the thing? Who is the buyer? What is the price? How is it delivered? An agent processing a user request — find me a CRM under thirty pounds a month for a five-person plumbing firm — composes its answer by extracting these four facts from each candidate page. A page that requires the agent to scroll, click an FAQ accordion, watch a video, or visit a separate pricing page to assemble these answers loses to a competitor that prints them in plain text near the top.
Plain language beats clever copy
Marketing copy is often optimised for emotional resonance, brand voice, or ranking on a single keyword. Agent-friendly copy is optimised for literal extraction. 'A cloud-native AI-powered productivity platform that empowers teams to unlock their potential' tells an agent nothing. 'A web-based task manager for small teams. Priced at eight pounds per user per month. Includes calendar sync, mobile apps, and a free 14-day trial.' tells it everything. The first sentence wins a creative-director award; the second wins a recommendation. Both can coexist on the same page — clever brand copy in the hero, literal copy in the body — but the literal version cannot be skipped or hidden.
Headings should mirror the questions
Pages that use headings such as 'What is X?', 'Who is X for?', 'How much does X cost?', and 'How does X work?' make the four answers trivially extractable. AI assistants cite such pages disproportionately because the heading itself is a strong match signal for common queries. The same pages also tend to win Google's AI Overviews and featured snippets. The cost of restructuring a page this way is usually a single afternoon of editing; the benefit compounds across every assistant and search engine that reads the page.
Above the fold is still real estate that matters
Most agent crawlers do not load the entire page when they have already extracted what they need. They read the head, then the first portion of the body, and stop when they have enough. Pages that hide the four answers below long sliders, multi-row hero animations, or video introductions effectively withhold them. The discipline is the same as that of a newswire lede: surface the most-important factual claims in the first 150 to 250 words, then elaborate. Storytelling that adds context — origin, ethos, brand voice — still has its place, but later in the document, not in front of it.
Open one of your most important product or service pages. Inside the first screenful, can a literal reader find the four answers — what it is, who it is for, what it costs, and how it works? If not, where do those answers actually live?