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Technical SEO

The Foundation Everything Sits On.

Technical SEO makes sure search engines and AI systems can find, read, understand and trust your website - crawling, indexing, rendering, speed, structure and machine-readable data. It's mostly invisible when it works, and capable of erasing everything else when it doesn't.

69%of AI crawlers cannot execute JavaScript - a site can rank perfectly in Google and be invisible to AI answers

The infrastructure that makes everything else legible

01

Crawling & Indexing

Can search engines reach and store your pages? A single stray Disallow rule can take a site from ranking to invisible overnight.

02

Rendering

Server-render or statically generate what matters - most AI crawlers never execute JavaScript at all.

03

Core Web Vitals

LCP under 2.5s, INP under 200ms, CLS under 0.1 - a modest ranking factor and a major conversion one.

04

Site Architecture

Shallow, logical structure with no important page more than three clicks from the homepage.

05

AI Crawler Policy

Training bots and search bots are now separate. A blanket robots.txt rule can silently remove you from ChatGPT or Perplexity answers.

Core Web Vitals targets

MetricMeasuresTarget
LCPMain content visibleUnder 2.5s
INPResponsiveness to inputUnder 200ms
CLSVisual stabilityUnder 0.1

3 checks worth doing this week

  • Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt - confirm you aren't blocking your own site
  • Disable JavaScript and reload your most important page - if content vanishes, most AI crawlers see the same blank page
  • Open Search Console's page indexing report and compare what should be indexed against what actually is

Failures that erase everything else

  • A staging robots.txt (Disallow: /) copied straight into production
  • Launching a redesign without a URL-by-URL redirect map
  • Client-side-only rendering hiding content from AI crawlers
  • Blocking every AI bot without distinguishing training from search crawlers
  • Treating a technical audit as a one-off with no re-check after each deploy

Frequently Asked Questions

Yes, but usually as a one-off audit rather than ongoing work. A ten-page site has few technical problems, and the ones it has tend to be serious: blocked crawling, missing redirects, no HTTPS.

No. It stops crawling, not indexing. A blocked URL can still appear if other sites link to it. To remove a page from the index, allow crawling and use a noindex tag.

Not inherently - Google renders it. But most AI crawlers do not, so content that only appears after scripts run can rank in Google while staying invisible to AI systems.

It depends which ones and why. Training crawlers and search crawlers are now separate bots - blocking a training bot doesn't stop an assistant citing you, but blocking its search bot does.

Open your robots.txt and confirm you aren't blocking your own site. It takes thirty seconds, and when it's wrong it's the most expensive error in SEO.

Not sure what's quietly broken?

Get a free technical audit covering crawling, indexing, rendering and AI crawler policy.