Don’t Let Technical SEO Debt Kill Your AI Rankings
▼ Summary
– AI search platforms like ChatGPT require brands to consider visibility in AI-generated responses, not just traditional SEO rankings.
– Technical SEO debt that was previously masked by Google’s sophisticated algorithms becomes critical for AI visibility since AI crawlers rely on raw text with fewer compensatory signals.
– Page speed is a significant factor for AI visibility, with slower websites experiencing fewer citations in AI responses despite potentially ranking well in traditional search.
– AI crawlers may be blocked by default on platforms like Cloudflare, making websites invisible to AI unless owners actively opt out of these restrictions.
– Organizations must assign clear responsibility for identifying and fixing technical SEO issues, as assumptions about who handles these tasks lead to accumulated problems and reduced AI visibility.
For marketing leaders, the digital landscape has fundamentally shifted. The rise of AI-powered search tools like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews means your brand’s visibility now depends on more than just traditional search engine rankings. Years of prioritizing speed over technical perfection have likely left you with a hidden burden: technical SEO debt. This accumulated backlog of minor site issues, once manageable, now poses a severe threat to how often AI platforms feature your content.
The primary obstacle in tackling this debt isn’t technical complexity; it’s the dangerous power of assumption. Assumptions act like termites within your search strategy, silently weakening your efforts. Everything may appear stable on the surface, but the structural damage occurs out of sight. The new pressures from AI search are testing that structure right now, and many foundations are proving unstable.
A critical and dangerous assumption is equating strong Google rankings with a sound technical foundation for AI. Many believe that if Googlebot can crawl and index a site effectively, AI crawlers should have no trouble. This line of thinking is flawed and often leads to a cascade of other incorrect beliefs.
Let’s dismantle the idea that Google search success guarantees AI visibility. Consider a comparison between two major accommodation sites, Airbnb and Vrbo. In standard organic search, Airbnb appears in roughly 50% more non-branded searches than Vrbo. However, in estimated ChatGPT mentions, Airbnb’s presence is over five times greater. While AI data is still emerging, it strongly suggests that Vrbo appears in AI answers far less frequently than its search ranking would imply. This disconnect occurs because AI crawlers don’t operate identically to search engine bots.
This brings us to the first flawed assumption: that decent Google rankings mean your technical debt is insignificant. Google’s highly sophisticated infrastructure uses a vast array of signals, which can often mask or compensate for minor technical shortcomings. A page with excellent content and strong backlinks might still rank well even with sub-optimal page speed. AI crawlers, in contrast, often strip away code and formatting to ingest raw text. With fewer signals to balance the scales, any issue that hinders content access has a disproportionately large impact on your AI visibility. There is no safety net.
Page speed serves as a perfect example of this magnified effect. Slow loading times are rarely due to one single problem. They are typically the result of numerous small issues, bloated code, large image files, inefficient scripts, each adding a tiny delay. While Google may forgive slight delays, data indicates that page speed is a significant factor for visibility in Google’s AI Mode. An analysis of over 2,000 websites cited in AI Mode revealed a clear drop in citations for sites with slower load times, as measured by Core Web Vitals like Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). Interestingly, the overall score from Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool showed no correlation, suggesting that the raw user experience metrics are what truly matter to AI crawlers.
This data currently relates to Google’s ecosystem, but the underlying principle is universal. AI crawling is computationally expensive. OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, revealed that ChatGPT processes 2.5 billion user prompts daily. To respond, large language models either draw on training data or dispatch crawlers for real-time information. At one agency, the ChatGPT-User crawler visited their site 6,000 times in a week, compared to 2,500 visits from Googlebot. This immense volume of crawling carries a substantial processing cost. It is logical to assume that as these costs grow, AI platforms will prioritize crawling websites that are fast and efficient to access, potentially sidelining slower, resource-intensive sites.
All of this presumes AI crawlers can even reach your website. That is no longer a given. Recently, Cloudflare, a massive content delivery network, began blocking AI crawlers by default. This change potentially renders millions of websites invisible to tools like ChatGPT and Claude. While website owners can opt out of this block, it is no longer an opt-in setting. If your site uses Cloudflare and you haven’t actively checked your settings, your content might be blocked from AI platforms through no fault of your own content quality or SEO efforts.
This highlights a new reality: you cannot assume that what worked yesterday will work tomorrow, nor can you assume that critical decisions affecting your AI visibility are being made within your organization. When a third-party provider makes a change, you cannot assume someone else is handling the fallout.
This leads to the core organizational problem: accountability. Most technical SEO issues have solutions, but they require someone to first identify the problem and someone else with the skills to fix it. Can you clearly name who holds these responsibilities in your company? Is it your development team, who builds to a brief but may not be SEO experts? Is it your SEO team, who may rely on outdated audit checklists? Or is it an external agency whose contract may not cover AI visibility or third-party infrastructure monitoring? Technical SEO debt accumulates precisely because everyone assumes it is someone else’s job to manage.
The time for assumption is over. Just as you wouldn’t wait for termites to become visible before treating your home, you shouldn’t wait for a catastrophic drop in AI visibility to address technical debt. The cost of repair will be far higher. You must initiate proactive inspections, identify crawlability issues, and foster clear communication between teams with defined accountabilities. Any investment in creating AI-optimized content is wasted if technical debt prevents AI crawlers from accessing it. The impact of technical SEO debt on your AI visibility is inevitable. The only question is whether you will act now or wait for your assumptions to cause your online presence to collapse.
(Source: Search Engine Journal)
