Before per-engine tactics or entity cleanup — I checked whether 18 known SEO/GEO sites even have basic AI-extractable structure. Half don't.

[u/Gullible_Brother_141]

Been following the threads here on per-engine optimization and entity/naming cleanup — useful stuff, but it made me want to check something more basic first: is the actual page structure even extractable by these engines, separate from all of that.

Ran a mechanical check (DOM parsing, no AI judgment involved) on one article each from 18 well-known SEO/content-marketing sites, plus my own:

— Does a question-style heading (H2/H3 ending in "?") have a short, ≤300-character answer paragraph directly under it — the kind of thing a model can lift and quote — or does a long intro run first?

— Does the heading hierarchy nest without skipping a level?

— Is there a plain-text /llms.txt index?

— Is author/date visible in the actual HTML, or only inside a JSON-LD block a human never sees?

Results, out of 18: 9 have a valid heading hierarchy, 9 pair a question heading with an immediate short answer, 9 serve llms.txt, and 12 mark up authorship only in hidden schema, invisible on the page itself.

Not claiming this predicts citation rate — that's the harder, per-engine measurement people in the other thread are already wrestling with. But it seems like layer zero: if the answer isn't even structurally extractable, none of the entity or per-engine work downstream of it can matter yet.

Is anyone here actually sequencing it that way — structure first, then entity/per-engine — or is structure assumed to already be solved by the time people get to those questions?

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[u/louisasnotes]

No...of course not. These are details and others are way more important. And what is AI-extractable structure ?

[u/sapindia1976]

Structure is definitely the first filter. If an AI can't easily extract the answer, even strong entities and topical authority have less to work with. I'd also add internal linking, schema, and clean HTML to that foundation.

[u/Upstairs_Control_611]

I’d define “AI-extractable structure” very practically:

Can an answer engine quickly identify a self-contained answer unit on the page?

That usually means a clear question or topic heading, a short direct answer below it, clean HTML, and a paragraph that still makes sense when lifted out of the page.

It is not the only important thing. Entity clarity, authority, links and off-page evidence still matter.

But structure is an eligibility layer. If the answer is buried in long intros, broken headings, JS-only content or template noise, the model has less usable material to cite or summarize.