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Digital government discovery in the AI era: How to make a government page easy to find

What makes a government page easy to find in the AI era.
Kelly Davis-Felner

This is the second chapter in our two-part series about how AI tools and search engines help residents find digital services. You don’t need a background in web development or SEO to benefit from this series. Part 1 provides a framework for a quick audit. Part 2 decodes all the technical language so you know what to ask.

Part 2: What makes a government page easy to find — in plain language

Search and AI Optimization can sound complicated, and the people who do this for a living use a ton of acronyms and terminology. But it’s actually not that complicated. Use this blog post to have a great conversation with your web team about what you need.

These are the fundamentals of search engine optimization (SEO) and optimization for AI answers and what each one actually means for your team.

The .gov advantage. If your services live on a .gov domain, you already hold a real edge, so use it. A .gov address is restricted to verified US government organizations, and both search engines and AI models treat it as an authoritative source by default. If your services aren’t all on your .gov yet, moving them there is one of the most valuable things you can do. And if you don’t have a .gov at all (and can’t persuade your team to make a switch), the other steps below matter even more, so focus your energy there.

Machine readability. Before anything can rank you or quote you, a machine has to be able to read your page. That sounds obvious, but a lot of government content fails here. Machines usually can’t read text that’s trapped in:

A scanned document or PDF
A flyer or graphic saved as an image
A form locked inside a portal or behind a password
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Tip: If you can highlight the words on the page with your cursor, a search engine can read them too. If you can’t, that content is close to invisible. Real, selectable text on a normal web page is the baseline.

Content that answers the real question. Search engines and AI tools reward pages that answer the user’s question, using the words they actually used. A page titled “Treasury Division” buried three clicks deep loses to a page that says “Pay your property tax bill” and then answers the follow-up questions residents ask: what if I lost my bill, what are the fees, when is it due, what happens if I’m late.

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Tip: Picture how a resident would ask a neighbor at a backyard barbecue, or think of the resident questions you get at the counter or on the phone! Write the page to answer those questions, in those words. I.e., “how do I pay my property taxes if I never got the bill?”

EEAT: Experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Google uses this idea to decide whether a page deserves to be believed, and it matters most for exactly the topics you handle: money, legal deadlines, official records. In plain terms, it asks three things:

Does this page come from the organization actually responsible for the service?
Does it show real knowledge?
Do other credible sources treat it as legitimate?

You are the primary source. The goal is to make sure the technology recognizes that. Consider these steps:

Make “official” unmistakable. Lead with your seal or logo and your .gov address so residents and AI tools can tell your real page from a paid look-alike.
Put your name on the page. Show the office that owns it, a real contact (phone and email), and the office address. Anonymous pages read as less trustworthy to both residents and Google.
Show it’s current. Add a visible “last reviewed” date and keep the fee, deadline, and steps accurate. A stale page loses trust fast.
Cite the rule behind the facts. When you list a fee or a deadline, name or link the ordinance, statute, or official fee schedule it comes from. That’s what “expertise” looks like to a machine.

Backlinks. When other trusted websites link to your page, search engines read it as a vote that your page is the real thing. A link from the state’s main portal, the county homepage, a library, or a local news story all raise your standing. It’s word of mouth that machines can measure.

Structured data, also called schema. This is hidden labeling added to a page that tells a machine what each piece of content is. Think of it as signposting: “this is a government service,” “this is the fee,” “this is the deadline,” “this is the office phone number.” Humans don’t see it, but it helps search engines and AI tools pull the right facts and show them correctly. It’s one of the highest-value things a web team can add, and residents never see the work.

Audit your own site with an AI tool

You can get a surprisingly good first read on your own pages using the same AI tools residents use. Open the page you want to check, copy its web address, and paste a prompt like these into the AI tool of your choice:

Here is a page from our government website: [paste the URL]. Read it as if you are a resident trying to complete this service. 1. What service does this page help with, in one sentence? 2. What questions would a resident still have after reading it? 3. Is the fee, deadline, and step-by-step process clearly stated? 4. If someone asked an AI assistant how to do this, would this page give it everything it needs to answer correctly?

Then a second prompt to find the technical gaps:

Based on that same page, list the specific things that would make it easier for search engines and AI tools to find, read, and recommend. Cover: page title and headings, plain-language wording, whether the content is real text or locked in an image or PDF, and whether it has structured data (schema) for a government service. Give me a short, prioritized list I can hand to a web team.

The AI won’t be perfect, and it can’t see everything a real audit would, but it will give you a plain-English list of the gaps on your most important pages, which is exactly what you need to have a productive conversation with the people who can fix them.

What to ask your web team, in order

Whoever runs your website may be working inside a content system that is a decade old, with a long queue and a small budget. So don’t hand them 30 things. Hand them a short, ordered list, and ask them to address these things in order, so that the highest-impact changes happen soonest.

1. Make the service itself readable and reachable. The page that explains and starts the transaction should be real text on a normal web page, not a scanned PDF, an image, or a link buried in a portal. If a resident can’t reach the actual service in a click or two, nothing else matters.

2. Rewrite the page around the resident’s question. Use the words residents use. Lead with the task (“Pay your property tax bill”), then answer the common follow-ups plainly: fees, deadlines, what to do if they lost the bill, what happens if they’re late. Good news: you can write this yourself, and AI tools can help you draft it, so your web team may only need to post the revised copy. This is the single change that most improves how you show up in AI answers.

3. Fix the basics of each page’s title and headings. Every service page needs a clear, descriptive title and headings that match what people search for. This is quick work with an outsized payoff. AI tools can also suggest page titles and meta descriptions that will work well based on the content of each page — just provide a link and ask for its suggestions.

4. Confirm the pages can actually be indexed. Ask the team to verify that search engines are allowed to crawl and list your service pages, and that they appear in your sitemap. Sometimes good pages are accidentally hidden from search entirely.

5. Make sure it works on a phone and loads fast. Many residents arrive at your website using a phone, so your site needs to load fast and work well on a small vertical screen. Aim for a page that’s usable within about three seconds of tapping the link. Every extra second past that loses people before they finish.

6. Build authoritative links to your service pages. Link to them from your own main portal and department pages, get them listed in the state or county directory, and claim your Google Business Profile for physical offices so the right page and hours show up. You don’t even really need your web team to manage this — you can take the steps yourself.

7. Keep it current. Fees, deadlines, and steps change. Out-of-date pages train both residents and AI tools to distrust you. Put a simple review cycle on your top service pages.

8. Add structured data (schema) for your key services. This one is the most technical, which is why it’s last, but it’s worth asking for. Schema is code your web team adds so the fee, deadline, and steps are labeled for machines. It’s invisible to residents and high-value for discoverability. Your highest-traffic pages are the place to start.

If your web team can only do a few things this quarter, prioritize the first three. Those are the ones that move discoverability the most for the least effort.

How to get your web team to prioritize this

When residents can easily find your services online, more people complete what they came to do, and your team operates more efficiently. That’s the case worth making to whoever manages your site.

When you bring it to them, lead with the resident experience and point to what you found in your own 10-minute test. A real example of a service that’s hard to find, or an AI tool handing residents the wrong steps, makes the priority obvious. Bring the short, ordered list above so the ask is clear and doable.

You don’t have to become a search expert to make this happen. Knowing how residents look for you now, and asking for the right handful of fixes in the right order, is enough to move things forward.

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