Generative AI and emerging AI agents are driving significant changes in how web applications and APIs are constructed. Like the indexing bots that built search engines, generative AI relies on reading and understanding Internet content: your products, services, location, hours, and APIs. And it's happening now.
Obviously, generative AI is already able to access your information. But if you want to optimize how it consumes and understands that information—as well as represents it to consumers—then read on, my friend.
To ensure generative AI can accurately retrieve and process your content, optimizing metadata is critical:
JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data (JSON-LD) is a lightweight, machine-readable format that has become the de facto standard for structuring data, adopted by W3C in 2014. It is based on JSON and makes it easier for machines (like search engines, AI tools, or APIs) to understand the relationships between entities and the context of content.
Its simplicity has made it the go-to for major retailers, search engines, and social platforms. Adding JSON-LD ensures AI tools can fully leverage your APIs and applications, improving discoverability and usability.
For organizations managing hundreds of apps (and from our research we know that’s most of them), manually updating each to include JSON-LD can be costly and time consuming. However, programmable application delivery controllers (ADCs) (like F5 BIG-IP or F5 NGINX) can add JSON-LD programmatically given that many applications leverage similar frameworks and constructs, such as including breadcrumbs as navigation elements and semantic tags in applications.
The programmable ADC extracts breadcrumbs and semantic tags already present in the unmodified response, formats those elements into JSON-LD constructs, and injects them into the application.
This approach can further be tailored to only modify responses intended for AI or machine consumers, as adding JSON-LD does not enhance the human experience with the content.
Using a programmable ADC also allows a single rule to scale across multiple applications and APIs, enhancing AI interaction without additional development costs.
A programmatic approach to modernizing applications and APIs ensures both are AI-ready, enhancing automation and enabling better outcomes from generative AI tools without incurring significant costs or time investments.
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