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Headings in the age of AI crawlers
Posted by on November 5, 2025 at 9:13 pmHey all,
I'm a front-end web designer, and one of my SEO partners has told me that with the advent of LLMs and AI crawlers, heading structures are more important than they used to be in the good ol' age of Google.
They've requested that we use quite long and comprehensive headers, which is causing design issues, and I'm wondering if this is actually how headers should actually be used to maximize SEO.
For example, take the following fake copy.
Maximum Velocity Welcome to Maximum Velocity's home page! We're the fastest trucking people in the Atlanta area. Moving, freight and storage are our specialty. Price-matching guaranteed.I would previously have styled it as:
<h1>Maximum Velocity</h1> <h2>Welcome to Maximum Velocity's home page!</h1> <p>We're the fastest trucking people in the Atlanta area.</p> <p>Moving, freight and storage are our specialty.</p> <p>Price-matching guaranteed.</p>However, my partner insists that it's better for AI crawlers to have it as:
<h1> Maximum Velocity </h1> <h2> <span>Welcome to Maximum Velocity's home page!</span> <span>We're the fastest trucking people in the Atlanta area.</span> <span>Moving, freight and storage are our specialty.</span> <span>Price-matching guaranteed.</span> </h2>The latter creates CSS challenges (as each line has a different style despite being in the same H2), but mostly, it seems rather long and unnatural, as it features different types of information.
What would be the best 2025 SEO practice in a case like this?
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1 Reply
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Your partner has no idea wtf is he talking about
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Are you asking if the syntax makes any difference?
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Someone posted a very similar question to this recently for a wix site, but it was a styling only issue.
The span tags might as well be h2 tag or just one giant tag with br …
The claim isn’t true. Tiny, tiny chance the nesting causes confusion. Without knowing the context, I find it very hard to find a reason it would be beneficial… as written, only the location has any value, until the 4th element, it’s real AI slop
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From an SEO perspective, either way makes zero difference IMO. The only piece of text that probably has any real SEO value is “fastest trucking people in the Atlanta area”.
From a CSS perspective, it really shouldn’t matter either as you would just add a class to the spans which are supposed to be smaller in size, if they’re all part of the same h2 element.
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The best strategy in 2025 is to build minimum content for maximum impact and to acquire links to that content.
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Cleaner html is better html. Simple. If you’re a crawler, you lose profit when you have to process bullshit. Direct incentive to right simpler code
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A I crawlers can work perfectly fine with standard code. There’s no reason to break things up in a weird way like that, especially if it’s going to mess with the formatting on the page.
Just by training data volume alone, web languages are going to be at the top end of any modern LLMs expertise. Do they think that they ingest line by line or something?
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I inject location into my h1 so it’s a bit cleaner. It may not answer your question but I’ve struggled with dynamically having a location in my titles. This fixed that. I use concatenation. Many of my sites are local search heavy so….
h1 keyword span location span h1
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