Machine experience (MX): Making content work for humans and machines

From Content Operations by Scriptorium - The Content Strategy Experts

May 4, 2026 · 20 min

About this episode

The episode discusses the importance of making content accessible for both humans and machines through the concept of machine experience (MX).

Your website may look great to humans, but can machines understand it? In this episode, Sarah O’Keefe (Scriptorium) and Tom Cranstoun (Digital Domain Technologies) explore the emerging discipline of machine experience (MX). Sarah and Tom discuss what AI agents actually encounter when they visit your web pages, why microdata and metadata are critical, and what content creators must do to ensure content is consumable for both human and machine audiences. Tom Cranstoun: Humans are looking for pictures, they’re looking for text, and they can infer. You may think, “Well, we’ve already added information on the page,” but by putting it in as microdata, it doesn’t appear on the page for the humans. It appears on the page for the machine. I think that that’s a critical distinction. We are trying to design for both. We don’t want to overload a human with information, but we do want to give the machine as much information as it can take. Related links: The Gathering Digital Domain Technologies MX books The Scriptorium Content Ops manifesto LinkedIn: Host: Sarah O’Keefe Guest: Tom Cranstoun Transcript: Disclaimer: This is a…

People in this episode

Host: Sarah O’Keefe

Guest: Tom Cranstoun

Topics covered

machine experience
content strategy
AI agents
microdata
metadata
content creation

Keywords

machine experience
content strategy
AI
microdata
metadata
content creation
web pages

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Digital Domain Technologies, Scriptorium