The AI Graph: an open standard for AI-readable pages
Open Graph solved a real problem in 2010: pages had no reliable way to tell social platforms what they were about, so link previews were a mess of guessed titles and wrong images. A handful of og: tags fixed it, and the whole web adopted them in a couple of years.
AI crawlers have the same problem today, at higher stakes. When an assistant reads your page, it decides on its own what the page is, what matters on it, and how to attribute it — or whether to attribute it at all. The AI Graph is our answer: a small set of Open-Graph-style meta tags that remove the guesswork.
The core tags
Four tags are required, and they cover most pages:
<meta property="ai:type" content="article">
<meta property="ai:title" content="The 1:16 Pour-Over Method">
<meta property="ai:summary" content="A step-by-step pour-over method using a 1:16 ratio.">
<meta property="ai:cite_as" content="Craft & Quill">ai:typedeclares what the page is —article,product,business,service,saas,recipe,event, orprofile. Type is context: a product page and an opinion piece should be summarized very differently.ai:titleis the canonical title you want models to summarize under — not whatever your CMS appended to the<title>tag.ai:summaryis the answer you would give if a model asked you to describe the page in one sentence. Write it yourself instead of letting the model improvise.ai:cite_asis the name you want attached to the citation. Without it, engines fall back to your domain, a truncated title, or nothing.
Thirteen optional tags layer on from there — authorship, dates, product data, key points and more. The one worth calling out is ai:allow, which states which uses you welcome (summarize,cite,compare); it’s a signal of intent, and well-behaved crawlers respect it. The full vocabulary lives in the canonical spec at askthis.dev/standard.
How to add them
If you use AskThis, you don’t hand-write these: the onboarding scan generates AI Graph tags for your key pages, and the WordPress and Shopify plugins inject them automatically. On a custom stack, add the tags to your <head> template the same way you added Open Graph — once, server-rendered, per page type.
Two rules keep the tags honest. First, the summary must describe what’s actually on the page; a model that reads both will notice the gap, and mismatched metadata erodes trust fast. Second, keep it short — one or two sentences. This is a label, not a landing page.
Why an open standard
We publish the AI Graph spec openly at askthis.dev/standard and dogfood it on every page of this site, because a metadata standard is only useful if anyone can adopt it — including sites that never touch our widget. The more pages declare how they want to be read and cited, the better AI answers get for everyone, and the more traffic flows back to the people who did the work.
Add the four required tags to one page this week. It’s the cheapest AI-visibility win available.