Technical & Infrastructure
Semantic HTML
HTML that uses meaningful tags so machines — including AI crawlers — understand the structure and purpose of your content.
What it means
Semantic HTML helps AI crawlers distinguish a product name from a product description from a review, without requiring schema markup. A page built with proper heading hierarchy, article tags, and well-labeled sections is significantly more parseable by LLMs than a div-soup layout. For Shopify, this often requires theme auditing — many popular themes use non-semantic markup that reduces AI readability.
Why it matters for Shopify
Shopify merchants on themes with poor semantic structure may see lower AI citation rates even if their product content is excellent — the AI can't parse what it can't read.