A few years ago, Google all but begged SEO experts and content creators to create for humans first. They did so because they understood that both SEO and digital marketing prioritized search engines over consumers. Google engineers correctly asserted that people-first content is more valuable. But the elephant in the room remains: computer algorithms play a huge role in who sees what on the internet.
The Bots Are Still Among Us
There is no escaping the fact that bots consume internet information as much as humans do. It is just that they do it for a different reason. Bots scan and analyze content for the purposes of determining what shows up in organic searches.
While it is true that search is evolving – with machine learning, AI, and natural language processing (NLP) driving it forward – the core is still the core. Search engines still use bots in the form of algorithms to sort it all out. Therefore, website architecture that satisfies both human users and bots is non-negotiable.
How to Do It Right
The big question is this: if website architecture must satisfy both humans and bots, how does a web developer go about it? Pixsan Solutions, a San Diego web development, SEO, and digital marketing firm, says that satisfying humans and bots simultaneously is built on four key principles:
Read More: Content Marketing Agency: Structuring Content for Consistent Digital Growth
1. Flat Site Architecture
First is flat site architecture, known colloquially as the ‘Three Click Rule’. This rule stipulates that a user should not have to click more than three times to find what they are looking for. If a user is clicking five times or more, they will quickly give up and move on to another site.
Interestingly, a similar principle applies to search algorithms. Bots consider deeply buried information important. They assign websites crawl budgets and link equity based on how close site pages are to the homepage. Flat architecture teaches those distances to a minimum. It avoids unnecessarily deep architecture.
2. Content Siloing
While siloing is generally considered a bad thing in the modern business environment, it’s actually a good thing for website architecture. Siloing is the process of grouping related content using clear categories.
This is good for human consumers in that it creates a logical journey as they navigate a website. It is equally good for bots because it builds topical authority. Bots interpret clusters of tightly linked data as proof of expertise and authority.
Read More: The Future of SaaS Marketing Agency in 2025
3. Internal Linking
Internal links are like digital corridors. They guide human consumers along a carefully crafted journey that reduces friction and increases the time they spend on the site. The more time spent, the greater the chances visitors will convert.
As for bots, internal links help them discover new pages. When combined with high-quality anchor text, a bot can better understand both page content and the journey a human visitor would normally take.
4. Technical Infrastructure
Last on the list is technical infrastructure. A site’s infrastructure must be optimized for mobile, or search algorithms will not bother indexing it. From a bot’s perspective, a site unfriendly to mobile doesn’t exist. Along with mobile optimization is properly structured schema markup. This is the language bots speak natively. Master schema markup, and you can provide bots with a level of detail that is otherwise ignored.
Tying everything together is a strong user experience (UX). Search algorithms and bots are trained on human behavior. So if a human user has a good experience on-site, the chances are pretty good that bots are properly understanding the site and indexing it correctly. The result is that both are happy.
