Sources for the Clarity Dividend talk
The slides
Here are the slides for this talk about the ROI on accessibility.
The Semrush / AccessibilityChecker.org study (2025)
10,000 websites analyzed in partnership with Semrush and BuiltWith. Accessible sites showed 23% more organic traffic, 27% more organic keywords ranked, and 19% stronger authority scores.
https://www.accessibilitychecker.org/research-papers/2025-accessibility-seo-study
Core Web Vitals — business impact
Case studies on how Core Web Vitals improvements affect conversions and user behavior.
https://web.dev/case-studies/vitals-business-impact
Deloitte: Milliseconds Make Millions
A 0.1-second improvement in load time correlates with an 8.4% increase in retail conversions.
https://www.deloitte.com/ie/en/services/consulting/research/milliseconds-make-millions.html
Navboost — DOJ antitrust trial testimony (2023)
Google VP of Search Pandu Nayak confirmed under oath that Navboost uses click data to re-rank results. Read the article about this trial on Search Engine Land.
Build agent-friendly websites — web.dev (April 2026)
Google’s official technical guide on how AI agents perceive websites through raw HTML, the accessibility tree, and screenshots.
https://web.dev/articles/ai-agent-site-ux
Google I/O 2026 — a new era for AI Search (May 19, 2026)
Elizabeth Reid, VP of Search, announcing the redesigned search interface and AI agent features.
https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/search/search-io-2026
May 2026 Core Update (May 21, 2026)
Search Engine Land coverage of the rollout.
A11y-CUA — UC Berkeley / University of Michigan, CHI 2026
60 real-world computer tasks across desktop and web applications, tested with Claude Sonnet 4.5 under standard and assistive technology conditions. Task success: 78% standard, 42% keyboard-only, 28% magnified viewport.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09310
Cloudflare Markdown for Agents (February 2026)
Real-time conversion of HTML to clean Markdown for AI agents, stripping CSS, JavaScript, and navigation.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/markdown-for-agents
https://developers.cloudflare.com/fundamentals/reference/markdown-for-agents
Google Search Central — optimizing for generative AI features (May 2026)
Official Google guidance confirming that SEO best practices remain the foundation for AI search.
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/ai-optimization-guide
“Blind people don’t visit my website”
That great article by Rian Rietveld about real world examples where bad accessibility makes people jump ship.
Supplementary sources
Not directly referenced in the presentation but useful background reading.
WebGames benchmark — Convergence Labs (February 2025)
50+ web interaction challenges tested against leading AI models. Humans: 95.7%. Best AI model: 41.2%.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.18356
https://webgames.convergence.ai
How AI agents see your website
Technical explanation of the three ways AI agents perceive web pages and what that means for site structure.
https://nohacks.co/blog/how-ai-agents-see-your-website
Browser AI agents field guide 2026 — OpenHermit
Overview of leading AI browser agents and how they interact with web content.
https://www.openhermit.com/blog/browser-ai-agents-2026
Core Web Vitals technical documentation
For anyone wanting the full technical picture behind the CWV metrics referenced in the talk.
Core Web Vitals overview: https://web.dev/explore/vitals
INP — Interaction to Next Paint: https://web.dev/articles/inp
Official INP introduction: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2023/05/introducing-inp
FID deprecation: https://web.dev/blog/fid
Other resources
Talk Emma Young
Emma Young is Head of Organic Marketing at Hostinger, where she leads SEO, Content, YouTube, and Localization. Emma’s talk at WordCamp Europe 2026, right after mine, was so complementary to what I was speaking about and vice versa. We had not planned it, but it turned out to be a very educational combo for anyone wanting to achieve great results in being the best source for LLMs, agentic AI and SEO in general! Here are the slides to Emma’s talk called AI search: why your whole company should care.
The accessibility checker plugin (free)
The accessibility checker has a personal version that is free to use and takes you very far!
Greyd.Suite, the accessibility-ready Suite for WordPress
When agencies ask me which WordPress platform I work with and why, the answer is always Greyd.Suite.
Greyd.Suite is accessibility-ready by default. That means the semantic structure your developers would otherwise have to build by hand is already there: the correct heading hierarchy, proper landmark regions, keyboard-navigable components. This is the same structure that determines how AI agents read and act on your clients’ sites, and it is a direct factor in how well those sites rank and convert. Getting it right at the platform level means you are not patching it later, project by project.
The other reason is velocity. Whether you run a lean team of five or a full-service agency with a hundred people, developer bottlenecks shrink your margin. Greyd.Suite removes that bottleneck by letting designers work autonomously in a structured, componentized environment, without generating the technical debt that comes back to haunt you six projects later.
I choose platforms that make the right thing easy to do consistently. Greyd.Suite does that.
Watch their demo and download the free version to try. It has about 80% of all functionality, including the Hub on multisite! Ready to get started? Here’s your 10% discount on your subscription, use this coupon code: ref_10_AB168324 when you order.