The way users search is changing. Instead of traditional search, more and more individuals are using AI-generated search. It’s easy, faster, and way more convenient.
Because of this, website owners, SEOs, and marketers need to come up with ways to appear more in this new style of search.
And while a lot has changed, the basis of technical SEO remains relatively similar. Technical SEO for AI requires accessible, clear, and trusted websites, similar to traditional search.
Why AI Search Needs Clean, Structured Sites
For an AI system, like ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google’s AI Overviews, to use your content in answers, the information needs to be presented in a clear, structured way. This means you must use logical headings, sections, semantic HTML, schema markup, metadata, etc.
Alongside this, your content should be crawlable and indexable. This is a non-negotiable. Before any AI search engine can cite your content, it needs to be crawled and indexed on a search engine’s database. If it isn’t, your content will never be parsed.
For your website to be crawled and indexed properly, your site must follow basic SEO practices. One important practice is website stability. In simple terms, this means scoring high on Core Web Vitals.
AI systems will find it easier to find and parse your content. As a result, your website will be recommended and cited more in AI-generated answers.
Core Technical SEO Areas That Influence AI
When it comes to technical SEO, there are a million and one things you can focus on. However, these are the key areas that influence AI:
Crawlability
If your content cannot be crawled by a bot, like Googlebot or Bingbot, then it cannot be indexed. This means the AI system cannot find your content and therefore cannot cite it.
Because of this, use robots.txt files only on pages that you want hidden from crawlers, leverage an sitemap.xml to guide crawlers, and specify a canonical URL to avoid duplicate content problems.
Mobile-first
Nowadays, almost every search engine has mobile-first indexing. For instance, Google primarily uses your website’s mobile version to crawl and index it.
Therefore, the better experience you provide to a mobile user, the more likely you’ll get indexed into a search engine’s database. This, in turn, means you’ll get picked up more in AI-generated answers.
Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals (LCP, INP, CLS) suggest how fast, stable, and responsive a website is. In short, they suggest how good the user experience is on your website from a technical standpoint.
Having good Core Web Vitals means your website is smooth and accessible. For AI search engines, this means they can easily access and parse your content, increasing the likelihood it’ll appear in answers.
Canonical Tags
Canonical tags suggest to crawlers which version of your page is more authoritative. Using these is recommended for pages that could cause duplication issues, which will result in the content being unindexed or poorly indexed.
These tags are normally used on e-commerce websites. For example, a single product might have multiple variations and therefore, multiple URLs. The content, though, remains the same. Without a canonical tag suggesting the “mother” page, crawlers will look at all the pages as duplicate content.
This can present a huge issue. Because all the content is the same, crawlers don’t know which page to index. As a result, it may result in poor indexing or no indexing. This, in turn, means your content cannot get parsed by an AI engine.
URL Structure
A clean, descriptive, and logical URL structure helps both AI and traditional crawlers to understand site hierarchy and content relationships.
By having a good URL structure, your content can be easily parsed and contextualised—two very important factors when it comes to appearing in AI answers.
Crawl Depth
Crawl depth is all about how “deep” the content is on your page from the homepage.
Ideally, the max crawl depth (or clicks) of important content from the homepage is 3-4. Any deeper, it loses crawler efficiency and therefore makes the content harder to crawl and index.
Because of this, to ensure your crawl depth is optimal. Failing to do so may result in key pages being deprioritised or completely missed while being crawled and indexed.
Rendering & JavaScript: Friend or Foe?
JavaScript is what makes a website interactive. And though great, it can cause problems when it comes to crawling and indexing your website.
If, for instance, important content only appears after a script is run, bots like Googlebot might miss it. As a result, the bot may never crawl the unloaded content, and, therefore, it may never get indexed. A lot of the time, this is caused by client-side rendering (CSR).
Because of this, you need to put key content in the page’s original HTML. This gives it somewhat of a load priority. When you do this to important content, it loads with the initial HTML (which loads first), so, as you can imagine, it gets crawled before any other content.
You can do this by using server-side rendering (SSR) or static pages for important content. This means content appears fully when it is accessed. When doing this, though, just be careful of hydration delays, which is when content initially appears blank as it hasn’t loaded. This can cause crawlers to leave the page quickly.
Luckily, you can see how bots interact with your content. By using tools like Google’s URL Inspection Tool and mobile-friendly tests, you can see how bots see your content. This will help you shape your rendering optimisation plans.
Schema and Semantic HTML: The AI Parsing Toolkit
Making your content crawlable is just the first step of optimising your website for AI answers.
Alongside this, AI engines need to understand the meaning and structure behind your content. This is where schema markup and semantic HTML come into play.
Both of these elements work together, giving machines the clarity needed to interpret content correctly.
Helping AI understand Your Content
Structured data (also called schema), add machine-readable context to your pages. By using structured types like “Article”, “FAQPage”, “Product”, “Person” or “Organisation”, you signal to bots exactly what each section means.
For example, with the “Article” schema, you’re suggesting to bots that “this page is an article”. Therefore, for AI queries that rely on articles to pull data from, your article can easily be identified as a potential source.
There are many different types of schemas. For a full list of what’s available, check out schema.org.
Why Semantic HTML Still Matters
In addition to schema, using semantic tags, for example, <main>, <section>, <header>, etc., provides a clear structure that both crawlers and AI can follow.
Proper usage of these tags also helps with passage-level SEO. This is how AI engines operate. It allows them to get snippets of information from a website without having to parse the entire page.
Combine, Test, and Optimise
Both schema and semantic HTML work best together. Both make it easier for bots to understand what’s on your page and what it’s about.
When implementing both, be sure to use tools like Google’s Rich Results Test or Search Console. Each of these tools will help validate the implementation of schema and semantic HTML.
Tools to Audit and Improve AI-Ready Infrastructure
| Tool | Key Functions | Use Case for AEO |
| Screaming Frog | Crawlability, canonicalisation, internal linking, JavaScript rendering | Identify broken links, crawl depth issues, and missing canonicals or meta tags. |
| Sitebulb | Schema validation, Core Web Vitals, crawl visualisation | Audit structured data implementation and track CWV performance across key pages. |
| Lighthouse | Page speed insights, Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) | Test load speed, visual stability, and user experience metrics for AI trust. |
| Log File Analysis | Crawl frequency, bot activity patterns, indexing signals | Confirm which bots access your content, how often, and whether they’re successful. |
Final Word
As we all know, AI-based search is changing the way people find information online. However, technical SEO remains the same.
At the end of the day, AI parses websites that are in a search engine’s database. Because of this, ensuring it can be properly crawled and indexed is crucial.
Therefore, despite the way people search is changing, the foundation of SEO, technical SEO, remains important for websites today.
What you should do now is perform a technical SEO audit for AI. See how you can improve the crawlability, indexability, and machine readability of your website.
For larger websites, performing a technical SEO audit is sufficient. Smaller websites, on the other hand, can get away with doing this once every three months.
