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If you’ve experimented with an AI-powered PDF reader, you already know how AI can scan through PDFs. Some people use AI tools to quickly find important information or summarize content in a larger PDF. AI can be a powerful assistant for working with any PDF document.
The benefits of making your PDFs AI-friendly are:
- AI tools can access your PDFs to extract information, which helps build your audience if you are a content creator or brand.
- An optimized PDF can streamline the process for others using AI with your PDF by making the PDF readable to AI tools.
- You can use AI to manage and summarize your own PDFs.
If AI is so useful for PDFs, how can PDF authors make it easier for AI assistants to parse a PDF? Do we need to optimize our PDFs for AI in the first place?
The short answer is yes, there is more that can be done to make PDFs AI-friendly. In this article, we’ll be exploring how AI reads PDFs, best practices for AI-friendly PDFs, and what AI may struggle to understand.
How AI Assistants Read PDFs
AI PDF optimization works similarly to optimizing a PDF for SEO. The high-level version is that AI, just like SEO, looks for certain tags, keywords, and document structure to understand a PDF. AI recognizes text more easily than images.
A PDF that isn’t native, such as a PDF that you’ve scanned, will be considered mostly an image to the AI. It will have to use OCR (optical character recognition) to scan through and parse the PDF. This takes time and often produces inaccuracies, so an AI tool will prefer a PDF that’s native.
What is a native PDF? A native PDF is created with a document editor, where the text is readable and selectable by AI tools and search engines. The text doesn’t have to be scanned by an OCR for the AI to parse it; it will be able to “read” the text on its own, the same way as if you typed in a prompt.
Metadata and document structure
If you Google a question and click on the first result, you’ll probably scan through an article, reading the subheadings and headings to see if the article answers your questions.
AI isn’t much different. As an AI tool scans a document, it will look through the headings, tables, and other formatting to understand the PDF.
When you’re creating a PDF in a document editor, make sure you’re applying the heading tags to lines of text you want to be headings, so search engines and AI tools understand how to prioritize text. Learn more about PDFs and metadata.
Accessibility tags
Accessibility tools like screen readers use headings and other tags to read information to users. AI will also make use of these tags, and even take them into account when summarizing a PDF.
For example, if you place an image in your document, add text that explains what is in the image. This could be in the form of a subheading, caption, or even the image file name. Additionally, you can edit the image’s metadata (alt text) so it contains a description of the image. Learn more about PDF accessibility here.
PDF AI Best Practices
With how an AI reads PDFs in mind, here are a few techniques that you should use to make your PDF AI-friendly.
- Organize information with headings and subheadings.
- Ensure all text in your PDF contains native, selectable text (not just scanned images).
- Edit the metadata of your PDF so AI can read the document title, author, and other information.
- Use formatting tools like bullet points and tables to organize information and make them scannable. (Real people like scannable text too!)
- Add subheadings, captions, and alt text descriptions to images so AI can easily parse your images.
Avoid AI confusion with your PDF
These are the factors that make it easier for AI to understand your PDFs, but what about things that AI may struggle with? Here are some things to avoid that make it harder for AI tools to read PDFs:
- Using confusing fonts (i.e. fancy or distorted fonts), especially if the PDF is non-native
- Not tagging or adding descriptions to images
- Using dense text blocks without headings or subheadings
Test Your PDF For AI Accessibility
Once you’ve optimized your PDF for AI, it’s pretty easy to see if the document is being correctly summarized and understood.
Download your PDF and upload it to Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or any other AI assistant of your choice. Enter a prompt such as, “summarize this document and explain it to me,” to have the AI try to parse your PDF.
If the AI is missing a key idea, detail, or section, you may want to give that topic its own subheading, for example.
You can also ask more specific questions, such as “what are the images that this document contains?” If the AI takes a while to answer this question, it’s probably having a hard time parsing the images, which may be a sign they aren’t properly tagged.
In addition to being more SEO friendly, this will also help AI tools understand and interpret the content in your PDF. There’s a high chance that search engines will continue to use AI, so taking these steps to ensure your PDF is AI accessible will keep you ahead of the curve!
FAQs About PDFs and AI Tools
As AI technology develops and evolves, the answers to these questions may change. We recommend visiting specific tools and testing their PDF abilities.
Can ChatGPT analyze PDFs? Yes, ChatGPT can analyze and read PDF files, and well-structured, text-based PDFs work best. It cannot handle encrypted PDFs.
How does Claude do with PDF files? According to our research, Claude can read them but only up to about 100 pages or 32MB, and it can’t handle encrypted PDFs.
What about Perplexity? Can it read PDFs? Our sources tell us that yes, the Perplexity app can read and analyze PDFs, either by uploading them directly or via public URL. It cannot handle encrypted PDFs.
And, finally, does Microsoft’s Copilot read PDFs? Yes, Copilot can read and analyze PDFs, but not encrypted or password-protected ones.