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Enable the condition · Consumable
Signals makes you usable.
Signals are the technical, structural and semantic cues that let machines do something with the evidence they find, and the kits and registers that let people do the same. The job is not to manufacture authority with markup. The job is to make real evidence easier to find, resolve, extract, verify, cite and act on, on the web and on every surface that now reads, speaks, shows or acts for a buyer.
SignalsMakes you usable
Enable the condition:
- Crawlability, indexability and rendering
- Explicit page structure and internal linking
- Schema and stable entity identifiers
- Extraction, verification and actionable data
- Surface readiness: agents, feeds, voice, in-car, in-store, out-of-home, media delivery
- Internal readiness: brand kit, fact register, vocabulary, asset library
Core check: Can any machine, on any surface the audience uses, access the right fact or asset, understand it, extract it, verify it and act on it, and can every person on the team find and use the same thing?
Open the full Signals diagram ↗Why it matters
Makes you usable
A useful page can still be difficult for machines to use. Content hidden behind rendering problems, ambiguous structure, conflicting canonicals or unclear entity ownership creates unnecessary friction. The same failure now happens off the website: a product feed with stale pricing, an agent that cannot complete the booking, a voice assistant that cannot resolve the location, a digital shelf with last season's claim, a sales deck with a different number from the site. Schema can label good evidence. It cannot manufacture it, and it cannot fix a fact that is wrong at the source.
Core question
Inventory every surface where a machine or a person uses the brand's facts, offers or assets, then verify each one draws from a current source of truth.
One brand. Nine surfaces.
Do audiences have the same experience everywhere they meet us?
The same brand, read by a different machine on a different surface. Eight of these are drift. One is done right.
“Closes 6pm.” Actually 8pm. The pin is wrong at the moment it matters.
“Who is [Your Brand]?” It knows a competitor. It has never heard of you.
Last season’s price in this season’s feed.
“[Your Brand] is red!” The social team made it up.
“I don’t know this brand.” Nothing it can read says otherwise.
“Where is [Your Brand]?” The nearest location never resolves; the “near me” query misses.
“Is [Your Brand] legit?” Three-star customer service is the only answer on the page.
Nicely done. Brand and campaign, same sentence as the website.
Machines are dumber than we think; it is the inputs that make the outputs. The fix is technical excellence plus a brand kit and fact register, collaboration across the teams that touch each surface, and monitoring. New surfaces keep arriving; each one is a new place to drift and a new place to win.
What to do
Enable Signals deliberately.
Technical access
Verify crawlability, indexability, rendering, canonicals, sitemaps and internal discovery for every priority page, with search crawlers, AI search crawlers and user-triggered fetchers checked separately.
Explicit structure
Use clear titles, headings, concise definitions, answer-first sections, tables and self-contained passages where they genuinely help.
Entity signals
Use appropriate Schema.org types, stable identifiers, sameAs for genuinely identical entities, and explicit parent, product and person relationships.
Verification
Expose authorship, update dates, methodology, sources, evidence provenance and stable URLs.
Actionable data
For transactional use cases, make price, availability, eligibility, inventory, policies and other required facts machine-readable and current.
Agent readiness
Test the priority journeys an assistant or shopping agent would run: find, compare, configure, book, buy. Fix the forms, flows and data that fail; expose endpoints only where a consumer exists; set agent permissions deliberately.
Feeds and commerce
One source of truth syncing specs, pricing, availability and policies to merchant feeds, marketplaces, retail media and catalogs.
Voice, in-car, in-store, out-of-home
Entity facts, locations, hours, offers and claims resolvable by voice assistants and automotive systems, and packaged in the formats digital shelves, kiosks, DOOH and point-of-sale screens consume.
Media delivery
Creative assets, metadata and brand identifiers packaged for streaming, CTV and programmatic systems.
Internal readiness
The brand kit, fact register, message architecture, vocabulary and asset library the whole team can find and use. A fact that lives in one person's head fails the same test as a page that will not render.
How to measure it
Use a baseline, not a vibe.
Baseline the condition for each reader, change one thing, retest under comparable conditions.
| Reader | Measures |
|---|---|
| People | Asset and fact reuse across channels; time for a new team member or agency to find the approved fact; number of conflicting versions found in an audit |
| Market | Surface coverage: which surfaces draw current data from the source of truth; feed accuracy and latency; agent task-completion success on priority journeys |
| Machine | Crawl and index health; extraction accuracy; entity resolution consistency; structured data validity; freshness and provenance coverage; machine-readable transactional completeness |
Next step
Connect the pillar to the rest of MAPS.
Signals works best when the other conditions support it. Use the full audit to see whether the constraint actually sits here or somewhere else.
The Enable workstream
Signals is worked by Enable in the method. See its deliverables, including the people and market additions, on the method page.