Get Weekly Marketing Tips
Join 30,000+ marketers and get the best marketing tips every week in your inbox
Technical Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) can make or break your website’s chances of reaching the top of Google. If Google’s bots can’t access, read, or understand your site, your content won’t rank, no matter how good it is.
The same applies to AI Search.
AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini rely on similar technical signals to discover and interpret website content. Your website may be excluded entirely from AI-generated responses if it is not technically optimised.
To help you prepare, we sat down with Andrew Tuxford, Head of SEO at Exposure Ninja, to understand how technical SEO impacts AI Search visibility. We’ve also compiled a handy technical SEO checklist to guide your AI Search Optimisation.
Struggling to know how to use AI with your marketing?
Download a free copy of AI Marketing: Everything You Need to Know and get immediately up-to-speed
What Is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO encompasses all the behind-the-scenes optimisations that help search engines and AI platforms access and understand your website effectively. Unlike visible content changes, technical SEO focuses on the invisible infrastructure that supports your site’s discoverability.
Andrew Tuxford explains, “Technical SEO is all the things that wouldn’t be visible to a user on the website, but bots are reading.”
Technical SEO includes elements like site speed, mobile responsiveness, site architecture, and schema markup. These elements might not be visible to users, but they’re crucial for how search engines and AI platforms interpret your content.
Why Technical SEO Matters for AI Search Visibility
Before we get into why technical SEO matters for AI Search, let’s rewind to how it works for traditional search engines.
Traditional search platforms like Google use automated web crawlers to discover and evaluate websites through this process:
- Crawling: Crawling is how search engines discover your content. Bots follow links from one page to another to map out your site and find new or updated pages.
- Parsing: Once a page is found, the bot parses (or “reads”) the HTML code to identify key elements like headings, metadata, internal links, and content blocks.
- Rendering: If the page uses JavaScript, the bot may render it. This means it loads the page in a headless browser to see how it would appear to users and to access content that isn’t in the raw HTML.
- Indexing: The content is stored in the search engine’s index after parsing and rendering. This allows your page to appear in search results for relevant queries.
Technical SEO creates the infrastructure that enables this process. Proper site architecture helps bots crawl efficiently, clean code helps them parse content accurately, and structured data helps them index information correctly.
But your visibility can vanish overnight when any part of that process breaks. Andrew Tuxford shares an example: “A website moved to a new domain and built the entire page in JavaScript. The website looked amazing from a user perspective, but it lost all its traffic because crawlers weren’t rendering the JavaScript.” This technical error completely wiped out the site’s visibility because bots couldn’t access any content.
The same principle applies to AI Search. AI platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity use their own bots to crawl websites and gather information for responses. If AI bots can’t crawl your pages effectively, your content won’t appear in AI-generated responses, regardless of how valuable or relevant it might be.
While AI Search Optimisation differs from SEO, both rely on solid technical foundations to understand your content structure, topic relationships, and authority signals.
Technical SEO informs how bots access, read, and understand your website. That means if a bot can’t access it, they won’t know it exists, and so they can’t rank it. If they don’t understand it, they still may rank it, but you’ll end up with the wrong traffic. The same applies for AI platforms. If your content isn’t accessible or clearly structured, it won’t appear in citations or AI answers.
Head of SEO
Technical SEO Checklist for AI Search Success
| Action | Why it Matters for AI Search |
| Fix technical audit errors | Removes barriers preventing AI bots from accessing your content. |
| Enhance site architecture | Helps AI understand content relationships and topic hierarchy. |
| Speed up Core Web Vitals | Prevents AI bots from abandoning slow-loading pages. |
| Use schema markup | Research shows schema markup improves AI Search visibility by 30%. |
| Clean content structure | Enables AI bots to properly understand and cite your content. |
Fix Technical Audit Errors
A technical SEO audit works like a website health check. It scans for problems that could stop bots from crawling, rendering, or indexing your content correctly. These include things like broken internal links, missing or duplicate meta descriptions, incorrect canonical tags, low text-to-HTML ratios, and JavaScript rendering issues.
Some issues are simple SEO fixes, like adding missing alt text to images or correcting broken links. Others are more complex, such as crawl-depth errors or misconfigured structured data. These may require input from your developer or SEO consultant.
You don’t need deep technical knowledge to run an audit. Tools like Semrush walk you through the process step by step. Once you enter your site, the tool crawls your pages, highlights issues, and suggests how to fix them.
Other useful tools include Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, SE Ranking, Sitebulb, and Google Search Console. Most offer prioritised issue lists with explanations, making it easier to focus on the most important fixes.
“Most businesses should run technical audits at least monthly, definitely no longer than quarterly,” says Andrew Tuxford. “Regular checks help you catch problems before they affect your AI Search visibility.”
Enhance Site Architecture
A clear, well-structured site makes it easier for search engines and AI bots to crawl, interpret, and prioritise your content. It also helps them understand how your pages connect and which topics you’re an authority on.
Here’s how to improve your site architecture for AI Search visibility:
- Use logical, clean URLs. Keep URLs concise, descriptive, and consistent. Group related content under relevant folders to reinforce topic clusters and site organisation.
- Build strong internal linking between related pages. Use keyword-relevant anchor text to guide bots through your site and signal which pages hold the most authority. This helps AI understand how topics connect and which content is central to your offering.
- Maintain a complete XML sitemap. Include all critical pages in your sitemap and submit it through Google Search Console. This ensures bots know exactly what exists on your site.
- Optimise your navigation. Keep your main navigation simple, logical, and consistent across all pages. Use breadcrumb trails to reinforce your site’s structure and support user experience and bot interpretation.
- Support topic clusters. Use an AI-friendly blog content strategy by building content hubs with a pillar page linking out to related subtopics. This structure makes it easier for AI models to understand your expertise across an entire subject area.
Speed Up Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals are a set of performance metrics defined by Google that measure how fast, stable, and responsive your site is for real users. You can check your site’s Core Web Vitals report in Google Search Console to see how you’re performing.
While these metrics are designed with users in mind, they also affect how efficiently AI bots can access and process your content.
“If your site is slow, search engine bots may not crawl it properly or at all,” explains Andrew Tuxford. “That includes AI bots. They work quickly and at scale. If your site takes too long to load, they’ll likely skip it and pull information from a faster competitor instead.”
Here are some tips to increase site speed:
- Compress and convert images to modern formats like WebP to reduce load time.
- Use a CDN to deliver content quickly across different geographic regions.
- Minimise unused JavaScript and CSS to streamline the code bots need to process.
Even small speed improvements can make a noticeable difference in how bots access and prioritise your content.
Use Schema Markup
“If I had to give businesses one single technical SEO priority for AI Search, it would be schema markup,” says Andrew Tuxford.
Schema markup is a type of structured data added to your website’s code. It helps search engines and AI platforms understand the meaning, context, and relationships within your content. By clearly labelling key elements, like your business information, products, or articles, you make it easier for bots to interpret and feature your content.
Research by Aiso shows that websites implementing schema had 30% better performance in AI Search results. “That’s the only thing they changed on the page. They ran tests, looked at performance in AI Search, added schema, and saw a 30% improvement just by adding schema,” adds Andrew Tuxford.
Is your marketing underperforming?
Request a website and marketing review and our team will tell you how to improve your marketing.
Clean Content Structure
Clean content structure is how your content is organised and marked up within the page’s HTML. In technical SEO, this includes using proper heading tags, consistent formatting, and clear content hierarchy.
When structured properly, this makes it easier for AI bots to scan and understand your content. It signals the main topics, subtopics, and supporting details, helping AI tools like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews decide how and where to feature your content.
“Heading tags are technical because they affect the structure of the page and how the code is understood, but they also have visual representation,” explains Andrew Tuxford.
In other words, they’re a win-win. Clean structure improves readability for users and provides essential context to search engines and AI models.
To improve your content structure:
- Use only one <h1> per page for the main topic.
- Break content into logical sections using <h2> and <h3> tags.
- Avoid skipping heading levels, like jumping from <h2> to <h4>.
- Keep paragraphs short and easy to scan.
- Use bullet points and numbered lists to highlight key information.
Tips to Future-Proof Your Technical SEO for AI Search
“It’s difficult to provide future-proof technical SEO tips for AI Search because we don’t know how LLMs are going to develop and what may change with them,” Andrew Tuxford explains.
That said, certain best practices will remain relevant, especially as AI platforms continue using bots to access and interpret your content. Here’s how to stay ahead:
- Use Structured Data: Schema markup helps bots understand the context and meaning of your content. It increases your chances of appearing in traditional search results and AI-generated answers.
- Stay on Top of Technical SEO Basics: Regularly check crawlability, site speed, internal linking, and page structure. If bots can’t access or understand your content, they can’t feature it in results or citations.
- Monitor robots.txt Developments: “There is some discussion in the community about whether we need a specific robots.txt file for LLM robots,” Andrew Tuxford explains. While not currently necessary, monitoring these developments could prevent future visibility issues.
- Set Up Proactive Monitoring: Technical SEO is not a one-time task. Use audit tools and alert systems to catch errors before they impact your AI Search visibility.
Build a Solid Foundation for Traditional and AI Search Success
Here’s a technical SEO checklist recap:
- Regular technical audits to catch and fix issues early
- Crawlable, parseable, and indexable site structure.
- Fast, stable pages with strong Core Web Vitals.
- Structured data using schema markup.
- Clean content hierarchy using proper heading tags.
Whether you aim to reach the top of Google or secure visibility in AI-generated responses, technical SEO is the foundation on which everything depends.
One of our clients (name withheld for confidentiality) saw a dramatic improvement in AI Search visibility through technical SEO alone. When we started their campaign, only 10% of their AI Overview-eligible keywords featured their website. After refining their technical SEO, we increased that figure to nearly 30%.
“All our influence on that campaign was technical,” explains Andrew Tuxford. “We tracked their AI visibility in a live scorecard, and you could see the growth clearly. Despite no major content changes, their AI Search performance improved significantly.”
This result highlights what we see across many client campaigns: technical SEO is what enables everything else to work.
Need help getting your foundation right? Request your AI and SEO Audit to find out how your website performs and what you need to fix to grow.
Read Next:
FAQs
How often should I do technical SEO?
Technical SEO is a constant process rather than a one-time project. Most businesses should run technical audits at least monthly if they have a dedicated digital marketing team. If you’re working with limited resources, quarterly technical reviews are the absolute minimum to maintain good site health and prevent issues from impacting your search visibility.
Which schema types should I prioritise for AI Search visibility?
Focus on Organisation schema for your business information, plus Service or Product schema depending on what you offer. Most businesses also benefit from Article schema for blog content and FAQ schema for common questions. The exact schema types depend on your content, but these core types provide the structured data that AI platforms need to effectively understand and feature your content.
How will improving site speed change my visibility in AI Search?
Faster sites make it easier for AI bots to crawl and access your content effectively. Slow sites may cause AI bots to abandon crawling attempts and move to competitors instead. While we don’t know if site speed directly impacts AI search rankings like it does for Google, faster sites ensure AI bots can access your content reliably and completely.
What technical audits will reveal AI Search blockers on my site?
Comprehensive technical audits using tools like Semrush, Screaming Frog, or Ahrefs will identify crawl errors, broken links, and accessibility issues that prevent AI bots from reaching your content. These audits also reveal missing or incorrect schema markup, slow-loading pages, and structural problems that make it difficult for AI to understand your content. Regular audits help you fix these blockers before they impact your AI Search visibility.
