The Technical SEO Guide: Crawling, Rendering, Indexing and Speed

Technical SEO is the work that decides whether anything else you do is visible at all. If a page cannot be crawled, rendered, indexed and served quickly, no amount of content or link building will save it. That is also true for AI answer engines: Google states plainly that a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown with a snippet before it can appear in AI features.

These sixteen guides cover the foundations in the order they matter. Start with access and indexation, then rendering, then structure and speed.

Crawling, indexing and access

Whether search engines and AI crawlers can reach your pages, and what happens when they cannot.

Rendering and code

What the crawler actually sees, and how JavaScript changes it.

Structure and architecture

How pages relate to each other and how users and crawlers move between them.

Speed, devices and structured data

Performance, mobile behaviour, and making your facts machine readable.

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Frequently asked questions

What is technical SEO?

Technical SEO is the work that makes a site crawlable, renderable, indexable and fast enough to compete. It covers robots directives, sitemaps, indexation, JavaScript rendering, site architecture, internal linking structure, page speed, mobile behaviour and structured data. It does not create demand on its own, but it decides whether the content and authority you build can be seen.

Does technical SEO matter for AI search?

Yes, and it is the entry gate rather than an optimisation. Google states that a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in search with a snippet before it can appear in AI features. Separately, AI crawlers such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot follow their own robots directives, so a site can be visible to Google and invisible to an AI engine.

Does schema markup improve AI citations?

The best available causal evidence says no. A study of 1,885 pages that added JSON-LD, compared against roughly 4,000 matched control pages, measured minus 4.6 percent on Google AI Overviews and effects statistically indistinguishable from zero on AI Mode and ChatGPT. Keep structured data for rich results and for making commerce data machine readable, but do not sell it as an AI citation tactic.

What should I fix first?

Access, then indexation, then rendering, then speed. Check robots.txt and snippet directives, confirm in server logs which crawlers actually fetch the site, verify that your content exists in the rendered HTML rather than only after JavaScript runs, and only then optimise performance.

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