Humans are not your only readers

Unless you put in a lot of work to block them, likely, one of your documentation’s largest consumers isn’t humans. “Traditionally,” this was search engine crawlers building an index of your documentation. In the past two years or so, this traffic now includes companies trawling material on publicly available sites to train large language models (LLMs) for artificial intelligence (AI) tools. As you will see later in this chapter and Chapters 8 to 9, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as it offers people new interaction options with documentation. By following the structure tips in this chapter, when you improve the structure for human eyes, you improve it for machine consumers, too.

One final advantage of good structure is for humans who use additional hardware or software to consume content – that is, those who use screen readers for reading page content out loud, typically due to poor vision. While those...