Definition
What is a machine-readable website?
Machine-readable website: A machine-readable website states important business facts and relationships explicitly in semantic HTML and structured data. This reduces the amount of inference required from search engines, AI systems, and other software.
Also called: machine-readable web, semantic website.
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Human-readable vs. machine-readable
A menu photographed as an image is human-readable. The same menu as an HTML table with prices is machine-readable. A “Book now” div wired to a script is human-readable; a real link to a booking page is machine-readable. The difference decides whether a search engine or an assistant can quote you.
The test
Fetch a page with curl and inspect the HTML without running JavaScript. If the primary content, headings, and facts are present, systems that rely on served HTML can retrieve them. If the response is an empty shell, those systems may miss important information.