Technical SEO in the Age of AI Crawlers: What’s Changed and What Hasn’t

Your website is being visited by more crawlers than ever before. Not just Googlebot. Not just Bingbot. Now you have GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and several others making their way through your pages.

This has changed some things about technical SEO. But not everything. It is worth being clear about which is which.

What AI Crawlers Are Looking For

Traditional search engine crawlers are primarily looking at your page to understand its content, check its structure, and index it for search results.

AI crawlers are doing something slightly different. They are collecting training data or real-time information to feed into AI-generated responses. They want clean, readable, well-structured text they can actually use.

The overlap with what Google wants is significant. Both types of crawlers favour fast-loading pages, clear structure, properly formed HTML, and content that is easy to parse. So if your site was already technically sound for Google, it is likely in decent shape for AI crawlers too.

robots.txt: A Decision You Need to Make

Your robots.txt file controls which crawlers can access which parts of your site. By default, most websites allow all crawlers in.

Since AI crawlers started becoming widespread, some website owners have started blocking them. You might see entries like “User-agent: GPTBot, Disallow: /” which tells GPTBot it cannot crawl your site.

Should you do this? It depends on what you want.

If you block AI crawlers, your content will not be used to train AI models or generate AI responses. This makes sense if you are producing premium, paywalled content or if you are concerned about your work being reproduced without attribution.

If you do not block them, your content has a chance of being cited in AI-generated answers, which is a form of visibility even without a direct click to your site.

For most content publishers who are trying to build authority and reach, not blocking AI crawlers is the more strategic choice. Getting cited in ChatGPT or Perplexity is free distribution.

Structured Data Still Matters

Structured data, the code you add to your pages that helps search engines understand what a page is about, has not lost its relevance.

In fact, for AI systems that are trying to extract specific information from pages, having clean structured data makes your content easier to use. Article schema, FAQ schema, and author schema are particularly useful.

If you have not implemented structured data on your articles, this is worth doing. WordPress plugins like Yoast SEO and Rank Math handle the basics automatically.

Page Speed Is More Important, Not Less

AI crawlers tend to crawl at scale. If your site is slow, crawlers may time out or deprioritise your content. More importantly, Google still uses page speed as a ranking factor, and slow sites lose traffic regardless of what crawlers are doing.

Run your site through Google’s PageSpeed Insights if you have not recently. Look at your Core Web Vitals scores. Common issues that slow sites down include unoptimised images, too many plugins, no caching, and not using a content delivery network.

Content Structure Matters More Than Before

This is where technical SEO and content quality overlap most clearly.

AI systems extract information from your pages by reading the structure: your H1, H2, H3 headings, your paragraph breaks, your lists. If your content is one long block of text with poor heading structure, it is harder for both search engines and AI tools to use.

Every article should have a clear H1 that matches the topic. Subheadings should break the content into logical sections. Important points should be stated clearly at the start of paragraphs rather than buried at the end.

What Has Not Changed

Core technical SEO fundamentals are unchanged. Your site needs to be crawlable. Pages need to load. Internal linking should be logical. Canonical tags should be used correctly. Redirect chains should be minimal. XML sitemaps should be up to date and submitted to Google Search Console.

A Quick Technical Checklist

Before worrying about anything AI-specific, make sure these basics are in place: Google Search Console is set up and your sitemap is submitted, no significant crawl errors exist, your site loads in under three seconds on mobile, all important pages are indexable, your robots.txt is not accidentally blocking pages you want indexed, internal links are working and not pointing to 404 pages, and structured data is implemented on article pages.

Technical SEO has always been about making it easy for systems to read and use your content. That has not changed. The number of systems trying to do it has.