SEO & Search
What Is Technical SEO?
The work of making a site crawlable, renderable and indexable, so that search engines and AI systems can reach the content in the first place.
Definition
Technical SEO is the practice of configuring a website so search engines and other automated readers can discover, fetch, render and index its pages. It covers crawling, indexing, site architecture, rendering, structured data and page performance. It does not cover the quality of the writing itself, which is a separate concern.
What it includes
Technical SEO is usually split into four questions about a page. Can a crawler reach it, can a crawler fetch it, can a crawler understand it, and does it load well enough for a person to use. Each question maps to concrete work.
- Crawling: robots.txt rules, internal linking, sitemaps and server responses
- Indexing: canonical tags, noindex directives, duplicate handling and pagination
- Rendering: whether content exists in the HTML response or only after JavaScript runs
- Understanding: heading order, semantic markup and structured data
- Performance: Core Web Vitals and the server response times underneath them
Why it matters for AI systems too
The same constraints apply to the crawlers that feed AI answer engines. Google states that its generative features use publicly accessible, crawlable content, and that the existing technical requirements for Search apply to them as well. A page that a traditional crawler cannot render is also a page an AI system cannot cite.
How it is measured
Most technical SEO work is verified rather than estimated. Server logs show what was actually crawled. Search Console shows what was indexed and why pages were excluded. A diff between the raw HTML response and the rendered DOM shows how much content depends on JavaScript.
Best practices for SEO remain relevant for AI features, and there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode.