The Hidden Cost of Clean Design

To the human eye, accordions, tabbed interfaces, and “read more” toggles are excellent design choices. They declutter product pages, keep mobile layouts clean, and help users focus on key visual elements.

However, these same design elements create a major roadblock for the artificial intelligence agents, search crawlers, and website assistants trying to understand your site. When you hide your most valuable answers-such as return policies, shipping costs, sizing charts, or warranty details-behind disclosure controls, you risk making that content completely invisible to AI.

Why LLMs Struggle with Collapsed Elements

When a human visits a website, they click to expand a section. When an AI crawler or large language model (LLM) reads a web page, it sees raw code. If your website relies on dynamic client-side loading to fetch accordion content only when a user clicks, search bots and AI scrapers will never see that text.

Even when the text is present in the initial HTML, the sheer volume of markup code required to build modern interactive pages poses a severe technical hurdle. In our published research analysis on why HTML-to-LLM scraping fails, we analyzed how web pages scale.

Our research revealed startling technical bottlenecks:

  • Massive File Sizes: On a real bedding retailer’s page, the simplified HTML reached a staggering 957,048 characters.
  • Severe Truncation: When applying a standard 150,000-character truncation limit (a common practice to prevent excessive API costs and speed up response times), only 15.7% of that page’s content survived.
  • The Elimination of FAQs: Crucially, about 95% of the disclosure controls-which housed the FAQs and vital product details-were completely lost once the page hit the truncation limit.

When these sections are truncated, the AI loses access to the exact answers your visitors are looking for.

Practical Steps to Make Your Content AI-Friendly

To ensure your AI concierge and external AI search engines can find and use your content, you do not need to abandon modern UX design entirely. Instead, apply these practical structural adjustments:

1. Audit Your Hidden Content

Identify where your most critical customer questions are answered. Are your shipping rates, return windows, or compatibility details locked inside a collapsed tab? Make a list of these high-value answers and track how they are served to the browser.

2. Deliver Content in the Initial HTML

Ensure that all text inside accordions and tabs is present in the source HTML when the page first loads, rather than being fetched dynamically via JavaScript after a user clicks. If an AI scraper cannot trigger a click event, it must be able to read the text directly from the source code.

3. Front-Load Critical Information

Because long pages are frequently truncated by AI scrapers, structure your pages with key information at the top. Place your primary product descriptions and crucial specifications early in the HTML document, well before the character count begins to balloon.

4. Keep High-Value Answers Expanded by Default

If a piece of information directly impacts a customer’s decision to buy (like sizing guides or return policies), consider displaying it as plain, fully expanded text rather than hiding it behind a click. What saves a few pixels of vertical space might be costing you search visibility and automated support accuracy.

Make Every Answer Findable

Adapting your website’s structure ensures that AI assistants can quickly locate the information they need to help your customers. By optimizing your HTML structure and keeping critical answers accessible, you prevent vital information from being lost in the noise. For the full methodology and numbers, see our research analysis: Why HTML-to-LLM Scraping Fails.