Most conversations about AI search jump straight to content: how to write answers, which questions to target, how to get cited. Those things matter, but there is a quieter question that comes first, and it is one any Top SEO Agency will check before touching a single page of copy. Can the systems behind Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Copilot actually reach your website and read it properly? If the answer is no, or only partly, the best content in your industry will not help you. It will simply sit there, unseen, while a competitor with a plainer but more accessible website gets quoted instead. Technical SEO has always been the part of search that business owners find least exciting. In the age of AI answers, it has become one of the most decisive.
Why Access Comes Before Everything Else
Every search system, old or new, works in roughly the same order. First it has to discover a page. Then it has to fetch it, read the content and understand what it is about. Only after that can it decide whether the page deserves to rank, or whether a passage from it deserves to appear in an answer. A problem at any early stage stops the process before it even considers quality.
Traditional SEO taught most website owners to think about one visitor in particular: Googlebot. Today there are several. Google still crawls with Googlebot, and that same crawl feeds both its normal results and its AI Overviews. Bing’s crawler supports Bing search and Microsoft Copilot. OpenAI, Perplexity, Anthropic and others run their own crawlers, some for training their models and some for fetching pages live when a user asks a question. Each needs to reach your pages, and each has its own habits and limitations.
Check Whether You Are Blocking AI Crawlers by Accident
The first place to look is your robots.txt file, the small text file at the root of your website that tells crawlers what they may and may not access. Over the past couple of years, many websites have added rules to block AI crawlers, sometimes deliberately and sometimes because a plugin, theme or developer added them without much discussion.
Blocking can be a reasonable choice. Some publishers do not want their content used to train AI models, and that is their decision to make. The problem is when a business blocks these crawlers without realising it, and then wonders why AI tools never mention it. It also helps to know that crawlers aren’t all the same. OpenAI, for example, separates GPTBot, which collects content for training, from OAI-SearchBot, which powers ChatGPT’s search features. Google uses a token called Google-Extended to let sites opt out of having their content used for Gemini model training, and blocking it does not remove you from Google Search or AI Overviews. A blanket block on everything AI-related can therefore cost you visibility you actually wanted.
It is also worth checking your hosting, CDN and security settings. Some security services now offer, or apply by default, rules that block known AI crawlers at the network level. Your robots.txt might be perfectly open while your firewall quietly turns those visitors away. If you are unsure, ask your developer or host to confirm which bots are allowed through.
Make Sure Your Content Exists in the HTML
This is the issue we find most often on modern websites, and the one that surprises owners the most. Many sites are built so the page loads first as an almost empty shell, and JavaScript then adds the actual content in the visitor’s browser. To a person, the result looks identical. To a crawler, it can look very different.
Google has become quite capable of rendering JavaScript, although it can take longer and does not always see everything. Many AI crawlers seem far less patient. They tend to read the HTML that the server sends and move on, without running the scripts that would have filled in the page. If your service descriptions, prices, FAQs or product details only appear after JavaScript runs, there is a real chance that some AI systems never see them at all.
A simple test is to view the page source in your browser, rather than inspecting the live page, and search for a sentence from your main content. If you cannot find it in the source, a crawler that does not render JavaScript cannot find it either. The fix is usually server-side rendering or static generation, so that the important content is present in the HTML from the start. On WordPress sites, this is rarely a problem with standard page builders, but it can come up with certain sliders, tabs, accordions, and third-party widgets that load content late.
Keep Important Information Out of Images and Downloads
Closely related is content that exists only inside images or files. Pricing tables saved as graphics, service brochures available only as PDF downloads, opening hours embedded in a banner and infographics with no supporting text all make life harder for crawlers. Some systems can read text in images and PDFs, but plain HTML text is always the safer option. If a fact matters to a buying decision, put it on the page as text.
Speed and Stability Still Count
Page speed has been part of Google’s ranking systems for years through Core Web Vitals, which measure how quickly a page loads, how soon it responds to input and how stable the layout is while loading. Slow pages lose visitors, and that alone is reason enough to fix them. Speed matters to crawlers as well. A crawler that fetches pages live while a user waits for an answer has little reason to wait for a slow server. A site that times out, throws errors, or responds sluggishly gives every search system a reason to look elsewhere.
The usual remedies are well known: reliable hosting, sensibly sized and compressed images, caching, fewer heavy plugins and scripts, and a content delivery network for visitors spread across the country or further afield. None of it is new. What has changed is how many systems are now affected when it goes wrong.
Do Not Forget Bing
Many South African businesses have never opened Bing Webmaster Tools, on the reasonable basis that very few of their customers use Bing directly. That calculation looks different now. Microsoft Copilot draws on Bing’s index, and Bing has also been a source behind ChatGPT’s search results. If Bing hasn’t indexed your important pages, you may be missing from answers in tools your customers use.
Setting up Bing Webmaster Tools takes a few minutes, and you can import your site straight from Google Search Console. Submit your XML sitemap, check for crawl errors and consider enabling IndexNow. This protocol lets your site notify Bing and other participating search engines when pages are added or updated. Several popular WordPress SEO plugins support it with a single setting.
Use Structured Data to Remove Guesswork
Once crawlers can reach and read your pages, structured data helps them interpret what they find. Organisation and LocalBusiness schema confirm who you are and where you operate. Service and Product schema describe what you sell. Article schema identifies authors and publication dates. FAQ markup pairs questions with answers. None of this guarantees a citation, but it reduces the chance of a system misunderstanding your page, and it is one of the few places where you can state facts in a format machines are designed to read. We covered the content side of this in more detail in our post on how to structure content so AI tools quote you.
Keep Your Site Structure Clean
Crawlers discover pages largely by following links. Important pages that are buried several clicks deep, linked only from a footer, or not linked at all are harder to find and are often treated as less important. A clear structure, where key service pages are linked from the main navigation and from related content, helps every search system understand what matters most on your site.
Housekeeping helps too. Broken links, long redirect chains, duplicate pages competing for the same topic, and old URLs that return errors all waste the time crawlers spend on your site and muddy the signals you send. An up-to-date XML sitemap that lists only the pages you actually want indexed is a small but useful map for any crawler that visits.
What About llms.txt?
You may have come across llms.txt, a proposed file that would sit at the root of a website and point AI systems to its most useful content in a simple format. It is an interesting idea, and adding one does no harm. At the time of writing, though, there is little evidence that the major AI search tools rely on it, so it should not take priority over the fundamentals above. Treat it as an optional extra, not a fix.
A Practical Technical Checklist
If you want to test your own site this week, these checks will reveal most of the common problems:
- Read your robots.txt and confirm you are not blocking crawlers you want, such as OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot or Bingbot
- Ask your host or developer whether any firewall or CDN setting blocks AI crawlers
- View the source of your three most important pages and confirm the main content appears in the HTML
- Run those pages through PageSpeed Insights and fix the issues flagged for mobile
- Set up Bing Webmaster Tools, submit your sitemap and check what Bing has indexed
- Test your structured data with Google’s Rich Results Test and fix any errors
- Check Search Console’s page indexing report for important pages that are not indexed
Most of these take minutes, not days, and the results usually show very quickly whether you have a technical problem worth solving.
Good Content Needs a Clear Path
It is tempting to treat AI search as a purely editorial challenge, a matter of writing better answers and building a stronger reputation. Both are essential. But you can only judge content once it’s found and read, and that depends on technical foundations that are easy to overlook because they are invisible when they work. A website that loads quickly, serves its content in plain HTML, welcomes the crawlers you want, and is properly indexed by both Google and Bing gives every piece of content you publish a fair chance to be seen and quoted. If you would like an experienced SEO Agency to run these checks on your website and explain what they find in plain language, we are happy to help.
