Governments Urged to Make Public Websites AI-Accessible
In brief
- A new report highlights the importance of state and local governments ensuring their websites are easily accessible and usable by AI systems like ChatGPT.
- The Georgetown University study emphasizes that as more people rely on AI assistants for information about public services, governments must make their data easier for these systems to digest.
- Three key factors are identified: access (ensuring AI crawlers can reach content), accuracy (keeping info current), and structure (organizing content so AI can reliably extract it).
- For example, Mendocino County’s interactive dashboard made its data hard for AI to retrieve, leading to inaccurate results, while Larimer County’s straightforward webpage was accurately parsed.
- The report suggests governments assign clear ownership, take corrective actions, and regularly review these improvements to maintain transparency and reliability in their online information.
Terms in this brief
- AI crawlers
- Software programs that automatically explore and gather information from websites, designed to be understood by AI systems like ChatGPT. These crawlers help ensure that public data is accessible and usable for AI tools, improving the accuracy of information retrieval.
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