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AI readiness checklist: making your PDFs AI-friendly

When preparing new PDFs and auditing and editing existing legacy PDFs for use with Fuse’s AI Answers feature, please refer to the following checklist so that you get the best AI-generated answers from them.

It is highly recommended that you download or share these individual checklists with others in your organisation who are responsible for creating, auditing and updating content in the communities you have chosen to use with Fuse’s AI Answers feature to ensure they format the content correctly and therefore get the best results. For the complete list of AI readiness checklists, see Creating content for use with AI: readiness checklist.

Category

What to do

Document metadata

  • Add title, author, and keywords in PDF document properties

Structure with headings

  • Use built-in heading styles (H1, H2, H3) in the correct sequence

Logical hierarchy

  • Tag the PDF (e.g., "Save as tagged PDF") to maintain the document structure

Paragraph formatting

  • Use clear paragraph breaks; avoid hard returns or line breaks for spacing

Fonts & styles

  • Embed all fonts and avoid using images for text

Lists

  • Use native bullet or number list tools

Tables

  • Use real table tools (not screenshots), with headers and clean cell formatting

Images

  • Add descriptive alt text and captions
  • Use actual hyperlinks—not just styled underlined text

Language settings

  • Set the correct document language

Page layout

  • Use a single-column layout where possible

Clean layout

  • Avoid interactive elements (JavaScript/forms), background images, and multi-column structures

Accessibility checks

  • Run an accessibility checker (e.g., Adobe Acrobat’s checker)

Use an AI-friendly PDF creation method

  • If you scan the content, apply OCR (Optical Character Recognition).
  • Export your PDFs as tagged PDFs with a logical structure.
  • Do not use “Print to PDF” tools as this can strip all the formatting from a PDF.
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