Repair your heading hierarchy
Your page’s headings skip levels - an H2 jumping straight to an H4, for example. Machines rebuild your page as an outline from its headings; a skipped level breaks the outline’s nesting, and with it the model’s understanding of which points belong to which section.
Why do machines care about heading order?
Because hierarchy is meaning. An H3 under an H2 says “this is a sub-point of that.” When levels skip, the relationships become ambiguous - the parser can’t tell whether the H4 is a deeply nested detail or a mis-tagged section. Ambiguity is what keeps content from being confidently quoted.
How do skips happen?
Almost always through styling: someone wanted smaller text and picked H4 because it looked right, or a page builder component defaulted to a fixed level. Headings got used as font sizes instead of structure.
How do you fix the hierarchy?
Audit, then renumber:
- List your page’s headings in order (browser extensions like HeadingsMap do this in one click, or search the page source for
<h). - Check the sequence only ever steps down by one: H1 → H2 → H3, back up freely, but never H2 → H4.
- Re-tag offenders to the correct level and fix their appearance in CSS, not by picking a different heading tag.
Deploy and rescan - a clean outline earns full points, and it improves accessibility for screen-reader users as the same fix. Properly-formed semantic HTML is, per an ex-Google search quality analyst, the real “AI readiness” work - not exotic markup. While auditing headings, confirm the page also has exactly one H1.
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