Technical SEO
Technical SEO is the work that lets search engines and AI bots reach, read and index your pages: access, speed, structure and code.
Technical SEO is the part of SEO that makes sure search engines can reach your pages, read them and add them to their index. It covers what's under the content: robots.txt, sitemaps, redirects, site speed, mobile layout, structured data, duplicate pages and the HTML itself.
For a marketer, technical SEO is the floor everything else stands on. A great page that bots can't read doesn't rank, and it doesn't get cited by AI platforms either.
What it covers
Most technical work answers three questions. Can bots get to the page? That's robots.txt, links between pages, and server errors. Can they read it? That's whether the text is in the HTML the server sends, and whether the page loads fast enough. Should they index it? That's canonical tags, rules that keep a page out of the index, and duplicate pages. Google's SEO starter guide covers the basics.
For example, Kestrel Roasters relaunches its site with a new shop that writes the product descriptions with a script after the page opens. People see the descriptions. A bot that reads only the HTML sees empty product pages, and both search rankings and AI citations start to slip.
Technical SEO for AI search
AI platforms add a few items to the list. Each AI company runs its own bots, and your robots.txt or firewall may block some of them without anyone meaning to. Many AI bots don't run scripts, so text that a script loads may be invisible to them. And pages that are slow or that return errors to bots won't be read at all.
The fixes are mostly the same as for Google: put your text in the HTML, let in the bots you want, and fix pages that fail.
In AnswerOrbit
Website covers the technical side for AI. The Audit tab shows which of the 42 AI bots we know may read your site. The Pages tab shows What a person sees next to What a bot reads, marks blocks that are Hidden from bots, and gives each page's health on a phone. Connect your server logs to see bot visits and failed requests. See Website and AI traffic.