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Technical SEO in the AI era: a practical checklist
AI search didn’t make technical SEO obsolete. It made it load-bearing. Language models and AI crawlers are impatient readers: if your site is slow, unstructured, or confusing, they skip it and so do the humans and search bots deciding whether to cite you.
Here’s the technical checklist we run on every engagement.
1. Crawlability & indexation
- Clean
sitemap.xmland a validrobots.txt. - No orphan pages every page reachable within a few clicks.
- Canonical tags correct, no duplicate content.
404and redirect handling that doesn’t leak crawl budget.
2. AI-crawler readiness
- An
llms.txtfile describing your site in plain language. - Structured data (JSON-LD) that declares entities: Organization, Service, Product, Article, FAQ.
- Content that answers questions directly, with quotable claims and statistics.
- Pages AI bots can actually fetch (some AI crawlers use their own user-agents don’t block them by default).
3. Performance
- Core Web Vitals in the green: LCP, INP, CLS.
- Fast, static-first architecture where possible (we build on Astro for this reason).
- Optimized images with proper dimensions and modern formats.
4. Structured data
- Organization + logo + sameAs (social profiles) for entity clarity.
- Breadcrumbs on every page.
Article/BlogPostingon editorial content.FAQPagewhere it genuinely matches the page.- Review/Product schema where you have real reviews and products.
5. Internal linking & site architecture
- A logical hierarchy: pillar pages → supporting pages → programmatic pages.
- Descriptive anchor text, not “click here.”
- Related-content links between posts.
6. Accessibility & markup quality
- Valid, semantic HTML.
- Descriptive titles, meta descriptions, and alt text.
- One H1 per page, logical heading order.
The point
Technical SEO is the foundation that everything else content, GEO, ads landing pages stands on. When we say BuiltBrilliant is a technical AI partner, this checklist is what we mean: we fix the plumbing first, then layer AI on top.