Can AI tools see your charts?

The same page with three Flourish embeds, three ways. The pages look identical in a browser — the difference is what an AI tool reading the raw HTML can learn.

Try it yourself

Give an AI assistant one of the page URLs below and ask:

On the first page it can't answer any of these. The questions name no figures — everything has to come from the charts' data.

1Before

Standard script embeds. No JavaScript, no chart: every AI tool sees three empty placeholders and nothing to cite.

2After: AI-friendly embeds

The same embeds with the fallback link Flourish now adds, no setup needed. Helps AI agents — assistants that follow links — which get each chart's complete, current data file. Crawlers that read a page once and move on still learn little.

3Both fixes together

The fallback links plus the charts' content rendered into the page itself — a text summary and data table per chart, hidden from readers by a line of JavaScript after load. This is the fix for AI crawlers, which read a page once and never follow links. It takes some code in your publishing pipeline.

Using the Live API?

AI-friendly embeds don't apply to the Live API: a Live API chart is built in the browser from data your page already holds, so there's no published data file to link to. The fix is to render the content yourself — and because the data is already in your page, it's a smaller step than for script embeds.

4Live API

The sector chart built with the Live API. The data sits in a script tag, which AI pipelines discard — a tool reading the page learns nothing.

5Live API + rendered content

The same page with the chart's content rendered into the HTML, hidden from readers by a line of JavaScript after load. Try the first question against both pages.

You can also see the difference directly: curl any of these pages and compare the raw HTML that comes back.
To learn how both fixes work, read the Flourish developer docs.