What is heading hierarchy?
Heading hierarchy is the nested structure of a page's H1 through H6 tags, used to mark which sections a page contains and how they relate, rather than to make text visually larger.
Its effect on ranking is modest and mostly indirect; it mainly helps confirm what a page is about. Where it matters more directly for AI answers is retrieval: an engine building a grounded answer often pulls a specific section of a page rather than the whole thing, and a clean heading structure is what lets it identify which section actually answers the question being asked.
The common mistake is choosing heading levels by how big the text should look rather than by what the section actually is. A page with three H1 tags, or one that jumps from H2 straight to H5 because that's the font size that looked right, still displays fine to a person scanning it, but it gives a crawler a much weaker map of the page than a correctly nested one does.
Related
- Title tagA title tag is the HTML element declaring a page's name, shown as the clickable link in search results and often used as the label an assistant attaches to a page it cites.
- Structured dataStructured data is machine-readable markup, usually schema.org JSON-LD, that states explicitly what a page and its subject are.
- CitationA citation is a source an AI assistant links or refers to in support of an answer it has given.
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