Co-authored by A11ySolutions and Zammo.ai

The shift no one is talking about

Something quiet is happening to the way citizens find information online, and most local government leaders haven’t noticed it yet.

Gartner predicts that traditional search engine volume will drop 25 percent by 2026 as users shift to AI-powered tools to find answers. The shift is already underway. ChatGPT now processes more than 2.5 billion prompts per day, up from one billion in late 2024. Google’s AI Overviews, the AI summary that appears at the top of search results, reaches more than 2.5 billion users every month. Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude are scaling fast right behind them.

This isn’t a future trend. It’s happening right now. When a resident wants to know how to renew a permit, file a complaint, find a clinic, or pay a bill, more and more of them are asking an AI assistant first, instead of opening a city website. They want the answer, not the navigation.

Forward-thinking local governments are already adapting. Montgomery County, Maryland deployed Monty 2.0, an AI agent built with Zammo.ai and Microsoft Azure that handles more than 3,000 topics in 140 languages and has logged over 20,000 conversations with residents in under a year. Cities like Kelowna and Barrie have launched similar AI-powered 311 services. The shift is no longer theoretical, it’s already producing measurable outcomes for the communities that move first.

Underneath that kind of experience sits a digital foundation that has to work for everyone, including residents who rely on assistive technologies. That’s the layer A11ySolutions has been focused on for years: making sure the website, the forms, the PDFs, the portals, and now the AI agents on top of them, are accessible by design.

And here’s the part that most government and education leaders haven’t connected yet: citizens with disabilities are part of this shift too. People who rely on screen readers, voice navigation, or other assistive technologies are increasingly turning to agentic AI because, for many of them, it’s a faster and simpler way to access information.

The way governments deliver services to their residents has to keep up.

How LLMs actually read your website

Here’s the insight most people miss, and the one that connects accessibility and AI in a way few are talking about.

Large Language Models like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity interact with content the way non-visual users do, through structure, hierarchy, and semantic meaning rather than visual layout. They don’t see your website the way a person with full vision does. They read the underlying code, the same elements a screen reader interprets for a citizen who is blind or has low vision.

When an LLM tries to understand a page, it relies on:

Alt text on images, so it knows what the image is communicating
Heading hierarchy ( h1, h2, h3) so it understands how content is organized
ARIA labels and semantic HTML, so it knows what each element actually does
Clear, structured content, so it can extract a meaningful answer to surface to the user

These are exactly the same elements that make a website accessible to people with disabilities. Accessibility is the technical bridge between human users with disabilities and AI agents searching on behalf of citizens. It’s the same foundation.

This is the structural insight A11ySolutions has built its tools and practice around: accessible code is universally readable code, whether it’s being interpreted by a screen reader for a citizen with low vision, or by an AI agent searching on behalf of a citizen who just opened ChatGPT.

When a city website is poorly structured, it becomes invisible in two directions at once: to citizens who need assistive technology, and to the AI assistants that millions of other citizens are now using to find them.

The data that proves it

This isn’t just a hypothesis. The numbers are clear.

In August 2025, AccessibilityChecker.org and Semrush published a joint study analyzing 10,000 websites. The findings were striking:

WCAG compliant websites gained 23 percent more organic traffic as their accessibility scores improved
Accessible websites ranked for 27 percent more keywords, expanding their visibility across search results
These sites also showed a 19 percent higher Authority Score, a measure of overall trust and credibility online
Meanwhile, more than 70 percent of websites analyzed were not compliant, and non-compliant sites lost between 20 and 30 percent of their traffic to AI search tools

And there’s another layer of evidence that makes this even more compelling for government leaders specifically.

According to McKinsey, AI-enabled self-service can reduce service incidents by 40 to 50 percent, with cost-to-serve dropping by more than 20 percent. AI agents in contact centers have halved the cost per call while improving satisfaction scores. When that AI is built on top of a fully accessible digital foundation, those operational gains compound: better discoverability, better answer quality, broader citizen reach, lower cost-to-serve.

For a city or county leader, the calculation is straightforward: accessible digital experiences attract more residents, serve them better at lower cost, and stay visible in the AI-driven future of citizen interaction.

At A11ySolutions, we’ve seen this play out across our enterprise client base: the organizations that invest in accessible foundations consistently outperform peers on discoverability, conversion, and operational efficiency. What’s new is that the same foundation now also determines how visible they are to AI-driven discovery.

What this means for cities, counties, and citizen services

For cities, counties, and citizen service agencies, this moment is especially significant.

Residents today are experiencing remarkable service from AI-powered agents in their day-to-day lives. When they bank, when they shop, when they get product support from enterprise companies, they’re used to fast, intelligent, multilingual, always-on responses. They expect that same level of service from their government agencies, especially when they’re paying taxes for it.

The good news is that the level of service is now achievable with the team and infrastructure local governments already have, without launching a massive multi-year systems integration project.

Cities are already proving it. The City of Barrie’s chatbot offers constituents 24/7 access to the most accurate, up-to-date information. Kelowna’s 311 system delivers round-the-clock multilingual access to municipal services. Montgomery County’s Monty 2.0 handles thousands of public service topics in over 140 languages, including the seven most common languages spoken in the county. These are not pilots, they’re working systems serving real residents today.

The principle behind all of them is the same: meet citizens wherever they are, and democratize access to information so every resident, regardless of ability, language, or device, can get what they need.

On top of that, the regulatory landscape just shifted in a way that gives local governments breathing room to do this right, instead of rushing to comply.

On April 20, 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice issued an Interim Final Rule extending the ADA Title II web accessibility compliance deadline to April 26, 2027 for state and local governments serving 50,000 or more residents. A few weeks later, on May 7, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services published a parallel Interim Final Rule extending the Section 504 web accessibility deadline to May 11, 2027 for recipients of HHS federal funding. Both rules continue to require WCAG 2.1 Level AA conformance, but local governments now have an additional year of runway.

This is the strategic moment. Instead of scrambling to meet a deadline at the last minute, agencies have the chance to build inclusive, AI-ready digital experiences properly and arrive at 2027 ahead of the curve, not behind it.

The complete inclusive experience

This is where the Better Together story becomes practical.

A11ySolutions builds the foundation, optimizing the entire digital experience for the needs of everyone. This means the website, the PDFs, the forms, the portals, the surrounding tools that together make up a citizen’s complete journey with a city or agency. When that foundation is accessible, it serves both human users with disabilities and AI agents who need to interpret content cleanly.

Zammo acts as the bridge to that experience, an accessible agenticAI agent that engages with all users, regardless of how they prefer to interact, and meets them where they already are. Citizens can ask a question in plain language, in their own language, on the device they’re using right now, and get a clear answer pulled from the agency’s knowledge base.

You can’t have a truly inclusive digital experience without both. AgenticAI without accessibility leaves users stranded. Accessibility without agenticAI leaves citizens doing all the work.

AgenticAI without an accessible underlying ecosystem leaves users stranded the moment they need to leave the chat: when they need to download a form, fill in a portal, or navigate to a specific page. Accessibility without agentic AI leaves citizens doing all the work to find what they need, page by page, click by click, when they could have simply asked.

Together, the two deliver what residents actually expect today: get me what I need, quickly, in a way that works for me, no matter who I am or how I interact with technology.

Practical next steps for city and county leaders

If you’re a digital, IT, or innovation leader in local government and this conversation resonates, here’s a starting checklist for thinking about accessibility and AI visibility together over the next 12 months.

1. Audit your current digital footprint

Start with a clear picture of where you stand today, both on accessibility and on how discoverable your content is to AI tools. You can’t prioritize what you can’t see.

2. Prioritize the foundation: semantic structure and accessible content

Headings, alt text, ARIA labels, semantic HTML, accessible PDFs and forms. These are the elements that serve both citizens with disabilities and AI agents at the same time. Investments here pay off twice.

3. Bring agenticAI into the citizen experience

A modern, accessible AI agent on top of your existing knowledge base can meet citizens where they are, reduce call volumes, and deliver enterprise-grade service without a multi-year IT project.

4. Use the new regulatory runway wisely

With the extended ADA Title II and HHS Section 504 deadlines now landing in 2027, you have a unique window to build inclusive AI-ready experiences strategically, rather than reactively.

5. Choose partners who understand both halves of the equation

Accessibility expertise and agentic AI expertise are different disciplines. The best outcomes come from teams that understand how both fit together, technically and operationally, and bring them to the citizen as a single, seamless experience.

Bringing it all together

The shift to AI-driven discovery isn’t coming. It’s here. And it changes the math for every city, county, and citizen services agency in the country.

Accessibility is no longer just about compliance with WCAG 2.1 AA or staying ahead of regulatory deadlines. It’s now the foundation that determines whether your residents, all of them, can find you, understand you, and use what you offer in the AI-first world of citizen services.

At A11ySolutions and Zammo, we believe local governments have everything they need to lead this shift. The talent, the data, the systems. What’s missing in many cases is the bridge between the accessible digital foundation and the agentic AI that lets citizens engage with it naturally.

That bridge is what we’re building together. To explore how this could work for your community, schedule a no-pressure conversation with our teams here. Together in a joint session, we will walk you through what is working, what is at risk, and how accessibility and AI fit together for your organization.

About the authors: A11ySolutions is a digital accessibility company helping enterprise and public sector organizations build inclusive, compliant, and AI-ready digital experiences. Zammo.ai is an agentic AI platform that helps cities, counties, and education agencies deploy accessible, multilingual AI agents quickly and securely on Microsoft Azure, without large IT projects.

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