Technical SEO
A site every crawler can read without trouble
Every answer engine depends on crawling. If Googlebot, Bingbot or GPTBot struggle with your site, nothing else in this plan works. We fix the plumbing first.
Quick answer
Why does technical SEO matter for AI search?
Technical SEO matters for AI search because answer engines can only cite pages they can crawl, render and index. Blocked bots, JavaScript-only content, slow servers, broken canonicals or missing sitemaps keep pages out of Google, Bing and AI crawlers, which removes them from the pool of possible sources.
Small technical faults have large consequences
A single line in robots.txt, a misconfigured firewall rule or a JavaScript framework that renders nothing on first load can hide an entire site from AI crawlers that do not execute scripts.
Multi-country sites face extra risk. Wrong hreflang tags send UK buyers to US pages, or make engines treat regional versions as duplicates.
These problems do not show in a normal browser. You only find them by looking at the site the way a crawler does.
What you get
What's included in Technical SEO
Crawl and render audit
We crawl the site as Googlebot and as non-JavaScript AI crawlers, and compare what each sees with what users see.
Indexing fixes
Canonicals, noindex rules, redirect chains, duplicate pages and orphaned URLs cleaned up in Google and Bing.
Core Web Vitals
Practical work on LCP, INP and CLS with your developers, focused on the templates that carry the most traffic.
Bot access policy
A clear robots.txt and CDN rule set for search, AI search and AI training bots, plus a published llms.txt file.
International setup
hreflang, regional URLs, currency and language signals for sites serving several countries.
Migration protection
Redirect maps, pre-launch crawls and post-launch monitoring so a redesign or replatform does not wipe out visibility.
Process
How we run it
3
crawler views compared: users, Google, AI bots
2
search consoles monitored: Google and Bing
100%
of fixes verified after release
- 01
Crawl
Map every URL and compare crawler views with the live site.
- 02
Prioritize
Rank issues by how many important pages they affect.
- 03
Fix
Write developer tickets with exact changes and acceptance criteria.
- 04
Verify
Re-crawl after release and confirm indexing in Search Console and Bing.
Where do you stand today?
Run the free audit before we talk. It shows the gaps this service fixes.
“Most agencies sent us dashboards. ZEPREACH sent us a task board and then actually did the tasks. I can open the workspace any morning and see what changed on our site and why.”
FAQ
Technical SEO: common questions
Straight answers. If yours is not here, ask us on a call and we will add it.
Do AI crawlers run JavaScript?
Many do not, or only partly. Googlebot renders JavaScript, but crawlers such as GPTBot and PerplexityBot often read the raw HTML. If your content only appears after scripts run, those engines may see an empty page. Server-side rendering or static generation solves this.
What is llms.txt and do we need one?
llms.txt is a proposed plain-text file at the root of your site that lists your most important pages for language models, with short descriptions. It is not an official standard and engines do not all use it yet, but it is cheap to publish and helps some AI tools find your key content.
Which bots should we allow in robots.txt?
For visibility, allow Googlebot, Bingbot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot and ClaudeBot. GPTBot and Google-Extended relate to model training, so some companies block them for legal or licensing reasons. We help you set a policy that matches your goals.
Do Core Web Vitals affect AI citations?
Indirectly. Speed influences Google rankings, which feed AI Overviews, and very slow pages can time out for crawlers on a budget. Fast pages are also more likely to keep the visitors that AI engines send you, which is the point of being cited.
Can you work with our developers?
That is how we prefer to work. We write precise tickets with the problem, the fix, affected URLs and how to test it. Your developers ship the change, and we verify it. For teams without developers, we can implement fixes directly on most platforms.
Related services
Free AEO score
Find out what AI says about you.
Run the free AEO score on your site. You will see which engines can read you, what is missing, and what to fix first.
Prefer a human? Book a 30-minute strategy call