There’s a reason I teach Signal live every six months instead of selling self-paced videos: The industry moves fast enough that I’d need to constantly update. No joke: In a May training, I included the Google Rich Results Test as a validation tool, and a week later got a notification that Google would be deprecating support for it come July. That’s the pace we’re working at.
But that doesn’t mean everything changes between sessions — in fact, some of the foundations remain constant. I’ve been teaching some version of website structure since 2018 in group programs (initially called Attract & Activate, then Content Love Lab, now Signal) and some of those slides have been remarkably stable. (My students groan a little when the hub-and-spoke diagram appears. It’s been there for seven years. It’s still right.)
In early 2022, I published a five-part series on website structure that covered navigation, homepage SEO, menus, categories and tags, and internal linking. I had no idea that later that year, ChatGPT would launch and disrupt everything I’d just created, and it took me years to understand just how much had changed with the rollout of these new AI-mediated search tools.
Over the next two years, the questions my clients asked slowly shifted, and every six months I updated my slide decks. Even when the structural slides stayed the same, the way I explained them evolved to add new layers of AI discoverability.
The principles haven’t changed since 2018 — your website is still a tool to help people find you, trust you, and decide to hire you. But some of the mechanisms for how you have to present yourself have become more complicated. Now you have to help AI build a map of what you know, who you are, and why you’re worth citing.
Same slides. Different stakes.
Most of what I published in 2022 still holds, because they’re still focusing on your website’s first two jobs. This post is where I tell you what has remained true, what additional strategies you need to consider, and what your website needs now that it didn’t used to.
Your Website Has Three Jobs
Your website used to have two jobs:
Job 1: Human usability.
Real people landing on any page of your site should immediately understand what you offer, who you serve, and what to do next. This was true in 2018 and it’s still the foundation. If your site doesn’t serve humans first, nothing else matters.
Job 2: Search crawlability.
Search engines need to find every page that matters, understand how those pages relate to each other, and index the right ones. This was the primary lens I was teaching through in 2022: Flat architecture, internal links, clear navigation.
But in 2024 (when Google added AI overviews & ChatGPT added live search), your website got a new job. (Because in this economy, we’re all juggling multiple jobs, amiright?):
Job 3: AI legibility.
AI systems need to read your entire site as a coherent body of work, understand who created it, and connect all the pieces back to you. This job didn’t exist in any meaningful way when I published that series. Now it’s the one most of my clients are behind on.
The structural decisions that serve jobs 1 and 2 mostly serve job 3 as well. The addition is that AI legibility has additional needs from your site that human usability and search crawlability never did — and those make the difference between being invisible in AI search results and getting recommended.
So let’s break down what you need to know about each of these factors of your content infrastructure, what’s been true for years, and what you may not have considered about how AI parses and organizes information.
Navigation: How People Find Your Offers & AI Understands Your Brand
What’s still true: Most of what I wrote in the 2022 navigation post is advice that still holds true today:
- Your main navigation should reflect the most important information on your site, use clear and literal labels, and stay limited to five to seven items.
- Keep your labels boring on purpose: “About,” “Services,” “Blog” are easier to navigate than “Who’s That Girl,” “Pick Your Poison” and “Musings.” Clever labels create friction for new visitors and ambiguity for search crawlers. Save the creativity for once people land on the pages.
What changed: Your navigation is now an entity declaration, not just a wayfinding tool.
AI considers the pages that exist in your main navigation to be the most important pages on your site, because they’re structurally linked from every page. Choosing what to include in your main nav is a clear structural statement: This is what I want to be known for..
And there’s a new layer that should be included in that highest-priority page hierarchy: How you think.
This wasn’t required in pre-AI search, when most service-based businesses could thrive with only a handful of pages Home, About, Services, Blog, Contact. They focused on who you are and what you offer, but not your methodology. And now, your distinct approach is a key way to differentiate yourself from everyone else in your category.
A framework or methodology page in your navigation says: This is how I think, and it’s important enough to live at the top level of my site. AI uses that top-level page to infer not just what you do, but how you do it.
This is genuinely new. Nobody was putting their methodology in the main nav in 2018 because it wasn’t a discoverability signal. Now it’s one of the clearest ways to make yourself unmistakable.
Homepage: Still a Brand Blueprint, Now an Entity Declaration
What’s still true: Back in 2022, I said your homepage was a blueprint to navigate your offers and build trust, and that’s still true. Your homepage has the most internal links pointing to it — from your navigation, your footer, your logo — which means it carries the most weight with both Google and AI. And it’s still the place that most people visit first when they’re discovering a new brand, to get a clear orientation of who you work with and what you offer.
What changed: Your homepage has a new job: Showcasing your expertise.
The copywriting advice that shaped most of our homepages — center your client, lead with their pain, make the transformation visible — was good advice. It still converts incredibly well. Your ideal client needs to see themselves in your messaging, or they’ll nope right out of there.
But it quietly made the expert service provider invisible.
When your homepage says to your ideal client “you’re exhausted from trying to market your business and getting nowhere” without also naming who you are, AI encounters a page about a problem with no clear author. It can read your offer, but it doesn’t understand who’s offering it.
And in the coaching and consulting space especially, every transaction is a relationship — and relationships need two people.
Your homepage can still speak to your client, but it also needs to name you, your company, your methodology, and the relationship between them — in the body copy, in the first half of the page. Not buried in the footer. Not implied by your logo. Stated.
These are called entity signals, and they aren’t just technical requirements. They’re trust signals, for both humans (who are looking for somebody with relevant experience that they can hire) and AI (which is searching for a specific, credible, experienced human behind the work).
So if you wrote your website copy pre-AI, here’s a quick test to check: if your homepage would make complete sense without your name on it, it’s time to put you back into your copy.
Footer
What’s still true: In 2018, I taught the footer as a place for secondary navigation and utility links: contact, legal pages, social links, maybe your email list signup. For local businesses, I reinforced that they should include their contact info there–Name, Address & Phone, exactly as it appears on Google Business Profile. All of that still belongs there.
But before AI, the footer was sort of like, “If it’s not important enough to live in the main navigation, but your readers might still need it, the footer is a great back-up location.”
What changed: Your footer is now one of the most strategically important places on your entire site.
AI reads it as a sitewide declaration. Whatever you say in your footer, you’re saying on every page. Which means your footer is the right place for your entity signal statement — a sentence or two that declares who you are, what your business does, who you serve, and when you started.
Your entity signal statement isn’t a tagline, it’s a structured declaration: “Love at First Search is an AI discoverability consultancy founded by Meg Casebolt in 2013, helping coaches, consultants, and service-based businesses become findable in AI-generated search results.” Every page on your site carries that statement. AI reads it every time it visits any page. That’s sitewide entity reinforcement with zero extra work once it’s in place.
Content Clusters
What stays true: I’ve been teaching the hub-and-spoke model of content strategy since 2019. Sometimes it’s called “cornerstone content” or “pillar content,” but they’re all based on the same idea: One central hub, which is your definitive guide to a topic, with supporting posts that each go deep on one aspect of it. The hub links to the spokes. The spokes link back to the hub.
One post doesn’t make you an expert,a body of work does. This was true when I first drew that diagram in 2019 and it’s still the structural foundation of everything I teach in Signal.
What changed: How much your cluster infrastructure mattered for establishing your expertise.
In 2018, a content cluster helped Google understand that you had topical authority on a subject by writing about the same concept more than once, from more than one angle, for a specific audience. Google rewarded that with better rankings.
In the AI era, a content cluster (which we now call a semantic cluster) does something bigger. AI doesn’t just check whether you’ve covered a topic. Now it builds a map of what you know, how you think about it, and whether your body of work is coherent enough to cite. A cluster of posts all pointing back to a hub post or named framework, all written from a consistent point of view, all connected to the same expert… that’s not just topical authority. That’s claiming your semantic territory: the space in AI’s understanding where your name and your topic live together.
If you’re not sure where to start building your cluster, look at your categories. If you’ve been writing about something for years but it’s spread across a dozen uncategorized posts with no central pillar — the posts often already exist. The pillar is what you write to pull them together.
Internal Linking: Connecting Yourself to Your Body of Work
What held: Every time you link from one page to another, you’re making a relationship explicit: ‘These two ideas are connected. This post belongs to this cluster. This framework underpins this service.’ Internal links were important for SEO in 2018 and they’re still important now. The core advice from the original internal linking post — use descriptive anchor text, link to related content, don’t orphan your pages — still stands.
What changed: Internal linking now has two additional jobs.
The first job stays the same as always: passing authority.
The second job is defining hierarchy. Your most important content should be your most linked-to content, and links should flow in a deliberate hierarchy — from homepage to framework to components to cluster posts. That structure is more intentional now than it used to be, and the full tiered system for building it is in the Tiered Internal Linking post.
The third job is entity declaration. In the AI era, a link isn’t just connecting two pages — it’s making a relationship statement that AI reads as part of your entity map.
So instead of just a link that says “click here to find out more,” You can explain how a post fit into your overall body of work. For example: “This post about Content Infrastructure is one of the core components of the BEACON Framework, the Love At First Search methodology for AI discoverability.” This entity signal statement + internal link tells AI what the relationship is, who owns the framework, and how this post fits into your larger body of work. That’s the new job.
The difference is in the sentence surrounding the link, not the link itself. Which means every time you link, you have an opportunity to do entity work — to make an explicit connection. The link alone doesn’t do that. The link plus the relationship statement does.
Page-Level Optimization
Getting your site architecture right is the foundation. What lives on each individual page — your headers, your FAQs, your meta descriptions, how you format content so AI can extract clear answers from it — is the next layer.
I’ve covered this in depth in How to Write Content That AI Can Actually Use. If you’ve got the structural pieces in place and you’re ready to optimize at the page level, that’s where to go next.
Content Triage: What to Do with Outdated Content
At some point, most sites accumulate content that isn’t serving them anymore. Posts from an earlier version of your thinking. Tutorials that are now outdated. Thin pieces that don’t reflect your current positioning.
You don’t have to fix everything. On healthy sites, twice as many pages are unindexed as indexed. That’s normal. The question is which pages deserve attention — and Google Search Console is the tool that tells you. The Performance Report shows you what’s working. The Pages Report shows you what Google has decided isn’t worth its time. Those two reports together tell you where to focus before you touch anything.
I wrote the update-or-retire framework back in 2021 in 3 Easy Steps to Update & Republish Old Blog Posts for SEO. The decision framework still applies. GSC is now the first place I look before investing time in any old content — because it tells me whether the audience signal is already there to justify the work.
Next steps
This is the C in the BEACON Framework and the foundation of the Murder Board Method. If you want to build it out with support, Signal is where we do this work together.
