On-page SEO
On-site, or on-page, means the content and setup of the website you run yourself: your product pages, guides, FAQs and how bots can read them.
On-site, also called on-page, means everything on the website you run yourself. Your product pages, pricing page, guides, FAQs, about page and blog are on-site, and so are the technical parts: what bots are allowed to read, how fast pages load, and how the pages are marked up.
It's the part of AI search you control completely. You can change it today, and nobody needs to agree to it.
What on-site work covers
On-site work for AI search comes down to two questions. Can the platforms read your pages? And when they do, do the pages answer the questions your customers ask?
The first is mostly technical. Your robots.txt has to let the platforms' search bots in. The text that matters has to be in the page's HTML, because bots don't run the scripts that add text after a page opens. And the page needs to load quickly and work on a phone.
The second is about content. Pages that are used in answers tend to state facts plainly, put the answer near the top, carry a visible date, and use headings that match how people ask. Structured data, like Organization or Product markup, helps a platform be sure what a page is about.
An example
Say Fernhill Coffee's subscription page has its prices inside a tab that a script loads. A person sees them. A bot reads the HTML and finds no prices at all. When someone asks an AI platform what Fernhill's subscription costs, the platform falls back on an old review that quotes last year's price. Moving the prices into the HTML is an on-site fix, and it's one Fernhill can make in an afternoon.
Where on-site work stops
Your own pages are only part of what the platforms read. Reviews, press and list articles on other people's sites often carry more weight, so on-site work is necessary but rarely enough on its own.
On-site in AnswerOrbit
The Audit and Pages tabs in Website show which AI bots your robots.txt allows, and what a bot reads on each page next to what a person sees. Page checks in Recommendations run eight checks on one of your pages for a prompt, and compare it with up to five pages the platforms cite instead.