Want to get cited in AI answers?
Before you worry about content optimization and offsite brand presence, let’s first tackle something most people overlook: technical SEO.
In other words, can AI bots actually crawl and index your website in the first place?
Because if AI systems can’t access your content, they can’t understand it – and they definitely can’t cite it.
Technical SEO is the backbone of your AI visibility, and this guide will help you learn how to nail it.
Why Technical SEO Matters for AI Visibility
According to recent AI SEO research, 63% of ChatGPT agents leave immediately after landing on a page due to technical SEO issues, including:
- HTTP errors (4XX and 5XX)
- 301 redirects to unexpected URLs
- Loading issues (including slow load time)
- CAPTCHAs
- Bot blocking
If a page can’t be rendered or accessed instantly, AI agents will simply abandon it and move on to another source.
And unlike Google Search, where you can manually request re-indexing, you can’t ask AI bots to come back and re-evaluate your pages.
That makes your first crawl more important than ever.
Once an AI system reads your content, it may not return for months, so every new page needs to be technically flawless from the start.
4 Technical Pillars for GEO Success
So, what does it actually take to make your website technically ready for AI search?
Here are the core pillars you need to get right.
1. Accessibility & Crawlability
AI models pull information from two sources: their training data and the live web.
In both cases, these systems rely on bots to crawl the internet – either to collect data for future training updates or to fetch real-time information for user queries.
And if those bots can’t access your pages, they won’t be included in AI-generated responses. As simple as that.
So, what you need to do is make sure AI crawlers have a clear passage to your content:
Check your noindex tags and robots.txt directives
A noindex tag tells crawlers not to index a page. While some LLM bots may ignore noindex tags, Googlebot certainly doesn’t.
Image source: Google
If you intentionally or accidentally leave noindex tags on important pages, they won’t be eligible to appear in traditional search results, which means they won’t be shown in AI Overviews and AI Mode as well.
Image source: Google
The same goes for your robots.txt directives, which tell search engines which pages on your site are accessible.
Apart from Google, OpenAI and Perplexity have both publicly confirmed that robots.txt can be used to block their bots from accessing your website’s content.
So, if you want your content to appear in AI-generated answers, double-check that your robots.txt file allows access to all major AI crawlers, including Googlebot, GPTBot, and PerplexityBot.
Make sure your content is publicly accessible
Pages that are password-protected, hidden behind a CAPTCHA, or locked behind a paywall can’t be accessed by search engines or LLM crawlers.
So, unless the page is meant to be private (like a user dashboard or subscriber-only content), don’t hide valuable information you want indexed.
Also, avoid relying on JavaScript rendering.
Besides Google’s Gemini and Bing’s Copilot, most AI models still can’t render JavaScript. Instead, they crawl the static HTML version of your page.
This is confirmed by a Search Engine Land study: 46% of ChatGPT bot visits begin in reading mode. It’s a stripped-down, text-only version of a webpage with no images, CSS, JavaScript, and schema markup.
So even if your site uses JavaScript, ensure your core text content is rendered server-side or preloaded in HTML.
Review your CDN settings
Some CDN providers like Cloudflare block AI crawlers by default.
Image source: Cloudflare
While this can protect your content from unauthorized use, it also means legitimate AI systems won’t be able to crawl your pages for search or citation purposes.
If you want your site to be eligible for AI visibility, review your CDN or firewall settings and whitelist trusted crawlers.
2. Site Architecture
Once AI systems gain entry to your site, make it easy for them to navigate through your pages and find the information they’re looking for.
This can be done by:
- Creating an XML sitemap: A sitemap helps both search engines and AI crawlers discover important pages faster.
- Building strong internal linking: Connect related pages so crawlers can understand your topic clusters and content hierarchy. Avoiding orphaned pages; every page should link to and be linked from at least one other page.
- Maintaining a clear URL structure: Use short, descriptive URLs that reflect what the content is about.
- Use breadcrumb navigation: This is especially useful for eCommerce sites with hundreds of product and category pages.
3. On-Page Signals
By now, AI bots can visit your website and find the right pages to use as sources.
But there’s another crucial question: will they trust your content enough to cite it?
That trust comes from your on-page signals – the technical cues that tell crawlers your content is worth cited.
Here’s what to focus on:
Page speed
A study by Kevin Indig found that response time is one of the strongest factors for AI citations. In other words, pages that are frequently cited by AI chatbots tend to load fast.
Image source: Growth Memo
Page speed even beats traditional SEO metrics like traffic, backlinks, and keyword rankings.
However, it’s important to note that this finding is correlational (and based on a limited dataset), so it doesn’t prove page speed directly causes citations.
Still, it’s a strong signal worth taking seriously. The faster your page loads, the less friction there is for AI systems to retrieve and process your content—which can increase the likelihood that your page is successfully fetched and reused as a source.
Content freshness
LLMs look for fresh, accurate information when forming an answer to a prompt.
Several studies have confirmed AI’s recency bias. According to Ahrefs, the average age of URLs cited in AI answers are 25.7% fresher than organic SERPs.
Image source: Ahrefs
Another study by Seer Interactive confirmed this: 65% of citations in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Overviews were published in the last two years.
That said, it highly depends on the topic. Evergreen content, like a Wikipedia page about Apple or a blog post on fundamental physics principles, doesn’t need constant updates to be considered authoritative and accurate.
Security
While we don’t know for sure whether AI chatbots assess page security when choosing sources, we do know that HTTPS is a confirmed ranking signal in Google.
If your site still serves pages over HTTP, it won’t rank high in Google search results.
And because organic rankings heavily influence what appears in AI Overviews, your chances of being cited drop significantly.
4. Structured Data
The importance of schema markup in AI search optimization is still a topic of debate among SEO experts.
On one side, some argue that structured data plays a major role in helping LLMs understand content and decide what to cite. On the other, there’s currently no direct evidence proving that adding schema markup alone leads to improved visibility in AI-generated answers.
The truth likely sits somewhere in the middle.
Schema markup is generally a good technical SEO practice. It helps search engines and AI systems interpret your pages more accurately and reduces ambiguity around content type, entities, and relationships.
But don’t expect it to be some kind of a silver bullet. Adding schema markup won’t suddenly guarantee that your content appears in AI Overviews, ChatGPT, or other AI search experiences. Its impact is supportive, not decisive.
So yes—you should implement schema markup where it makes sense. Just don’t expect it, on its own, to drive AI citations.
Here are some schema types that can help your GEO:
- Article / BlogPosting: Helps AI understand authorship, publication dates, topic hierarchy, and contextual relevance.
- FAQPage: Provides clean, structured Q&A pairs that LLMs can easily extract and cite directly.
- HowTo: Breaks processes into clear steps that AI systems can summarise or reference in instructional answers.
- Product: Essential for eCommerce; defines product details like price, brand, SKU, and reviews in a structured way.
- Organization: Establishes brand identity, social profiles, contact details, and trust signals.
- BreadcrumbList: Clarifies page hierarchy and improves AI understanding of site structure.
- Person: Defines authorship and expertise, which is useful for thought leadership content.
Best Practices to Keep Your Site Technically Sound
According to Andrew Tuxford, Head of SEO at Exposure Ninja, “It’s difficult to provide future-proof technical SEO tips for AI Search because we don’t know how LLMs are going to develop and what may change with them.”
However, Andrew predicts that certain technical SEO best practices will stay relevant, as AI models will continue using bots to crawl web pages either for their training data or RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) system.
Here’s what you need to do:
Run a Site Audit
Use tools like Spotibo to identify technical errors on your site.
It will scan all of your pages and flag any issues that could prevent search engine bots and AI crawlers from accessing and understanding your content, including:
- Missing metadata
- Broken links
- Redirection chains (too many redirects can eat up your crawl budget)
- Duplicate content
- Indexation and crawling issues
- Server errors
When you click on show details on each error report, you’ll see which URLs are impacted by the issue, so you can take immediate action.
Pro tip: Run this site audit on a weekly or monthly basis. This allows you to catch problems early before they impact your visibility in AI search results.
Monitor Page Crawlability
Even if your site is error-free, there might be other reasons why AI bots can’t read your pages.
Maybe your content structure makes it difficult for AI systems to interpret or retrieve information. This often happens when key content is hidden behind JavaScript or not available in the initial HTML response.
Use a tool like LLMrefs to check whether AI crawlers can access and understand your pages. And if not, what’s exactly preventing them from doing so?
Allow Major AI Bots in Your CDN and Firewall Settings
Review your CDN and firewall settings to ensure legitimate AI crawlers aren’t being blocked by bot filters or security rules.
The exact steps will depend on your CDN or hosting provider, but most require you to:
- Create an allow rule for specific user-agent names
- Exclude trusted bots from bot-protection features (like CAPTCHA or JS challenges)
- Whitelist their known IP ranges, if provided
To do this correctly, always refer to the official documentation from each AI platform:
Implement Schema Markup
If you haven’t implemented schema markup yet, now it’s the perfect time to do it.
This is especially important for eCommerce sites. Now that people can browse and buy products directly inside ChatGPT and AI Mode, structured data (particularly Product schema) can help your items appear in these AI-powered shopping experiences.
Here’s how to do it:
- Go to Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper.
- Choose a schema type and enter your page URL.
- Highlight elements on your page to assign schema properties. For example: tag your product name as Name.
- Once you’ve finished tagging, download the generated JSON-LD script.
- Add the JSON-LD script inside the <head> section of your page (or inject it via your CMS or theme settings)
- Validate your schema using tools like Google’s Rich Results Test and Schema.org Markup Validator.
Optimize Page Performance
AI systems operate under tight latency budgets. If it takes too long for AI bots to load your content, they’ll simply look for other faster sources.
Use Spotibo to measure your page’s speed, interactivity, and stability.
If the result is poor, click Show the details. The tool will take you to the Google PageSpeed Insights report, which shows you what issues are slowing the page down and how you can fix them.
The Next Step: Continuously Monitor Your Site’s Health
Technical SEO isn’t something you set up once and forget. Your site changes, crawlers evolve, and AI models update their algorithms regularly.
If you’re not monitoring your technical health, problems can go unnoticed for weeks – and by then, you may have already lost AI visibility.
Spotibo helps you stay ahead of these issues.
It automatically scans your site, flags new errors as they appear, and shows you exactly which URLs are affected. Instead of digging through logs or waiting for traffic to drop, you get a clear, immediate overview of your technical health.
Create your free Spotibo account today and try it out for yourself.
