01Technical SEO
Technical SEO: nothing else works until the machines can read it
Technical SEO from $900 a monthCrawl, render, index and crawler policy. Usually the cheapest findings and the first to move.
Technical SEO is the work that makes a site reachable, renderable and indexable. It is unglamorous, it is where most stalled programmes are actually stuck, and it is the first thing Searlixa checks before recommending any content or entity work.
Quick answer
Technical SEO makes a site reachable, renderable and indexable. It is where most stalled programmes are actually stuck, and it is the first thing we check before recommending any content or entity work.
The decision most sites get wrong by accident: OAI-SearchBot controls ChatGPT Search discovery, GPTBot is a training crawler. Blocking the second does not affect visibility. Blocking the first does.
Key takeaways
- Five questions come first: can crawlers reach it, render it, index it; is it fast enough; is the crawler policy deliberate.
- JavaScript-only content is content some retrieval systems never see. Writing more will not fix it.
- Migrations are the most common cause of catastrophic traffic loss at scale, and almost all of it is preventable.
- Log files reveal what audit tools cannot. Rate limiting and firewall rules block crawlers silently.
- FAQ rich results ended in May 2026. Keep the markup where it matches visible content; build no strategy on it.
- Doing content work on a broken technical base wastes the budget.
The five questions we answer first
- Can crawlers reach it? Robots directives, server responses, redirect chains, authentication walls, rate limiting that silently blocks legitimate bots.
- Can they render it? Content that only appears after JavaScript execution is content some retrieval systems will never see.
- Will they index it? Canonical conflicts, parameter duplication, accidental noindex, and thin pages competing with the ones that matter.
- Is it fast enough? LCP under 2.5s, INP under 200ms, CLS under 0.1 at the 75th percentile, measured on real devices rather than a lab score.
- Is the crawler policy deliberate? Most sites have never made this decision consciously.
The crawler decision most sites get wrong by accident
Search discovery and model training are two different choices.
OAI-SearchBot handles ChatGPT Search discovery. GPTBot is a training crawler. Blocking GPTBot does not reduce your visibility in ChatGPT Search, but blocking OAI-SearchBot does. Many robots.txt files block both because someone pasted a rule from a blog post.
We map every relevant agent, show you what each one affects, and let you make the call. The decision gets written down with a reason, so the next person to touch the file knows why it says what it says. If you are diagnosing absence from assistants, this is the check to run before any other.
What a technical engagement covers
| Area | What we check | Cost of getting it wrong |
|---|---|---|
| Crawl access | robots.txt, status codes, redirect chains, bot rate limits | Pages never enter the index at all |
| Rendering | Server vs client rendering, hydration, critical content in HTML | Content invisible to systems that do not execute JavaScript |
| Indexation | Canonicals, parameters, pagination, duplicate clusters | Your strongest page loses to your own weaker one |
| Site architecture | Depth from home, orphan pages, internal link distribution | Commercial pages starved of internal signal |
| Performance | Core Web Vitals at the 75th percentile, on real devices | Ranking drag plus measurable conversion loss |
| Structured data | Whether markup matches visible content and validates | Eligibility lost; in bad cases, a manual action |
| Log file analysis | Which agents actually reached which pages, and how often | Without it, crawler problems stay invisible to standard audit tools |
| Migrations | Redirect mapping, parity testing, staged rollout, rollback plan | The single most common cause of catastrophic traffic loss |
On structured data, specifically
Two things are true at once. Markup that describes visible reality helps machines interpret a page correctly. And no schema type showed a consistent independent advantage for AI citation in the 2026 research, while Google states no AI-specific schema is required.
So we implement it properly and we do not sell it as a growth lever. Related: Google retired FAQ rich results in May 2026, with Search Console API support ending that August. If a dashboard is still pulling those fields it is now returning nothing.
How this connects
Technical work removes blockers. Search work builds the coverage. AI Search measures whether either worked. If a site has rendering or indexation problems, doing content work first wastes the budget, and the baseline will usually surface it in week one.
At scale, the constraint shifts from knowing what to fix to getting it shipped, that is covered under enterprise delivery.
02Common questions
What teams ask about the technical layer
Should we block GPTBot?
That is a policy decision, not a technical one, and it is separate from search visibility. GPTBot is a training crawler. OAI-SearchBot handles ChatGPT Search discovery. Blocking GPTBot does not reduce your visibility in ChatGPT Search; blocking OAI-SearchBot does.
Does site speed still matter for AI visibility?
It matters for users and for ranking, which in turn feeds AI citation. There is no evidence of a direct speed-to-citation link. Treat Core Web Vitals as a conversion and ranking concern rather than an AI one.
Our content is rendered with JavaScript. Is that a problem?
Potentially a serious one. Content that only exists after JavaScript execution is content some retrieval systems will never see. We check this before recommending any content work, because writing more will not fix it.
What breaks most often during a migration?
Redirect mapping, followed by parity gaps where the new template silently drops content the old one had. Migrations are the most common cause of catastrophic traffic loss at scale, and almost all of it is preventable with a staged rollout and a rollback plan.
Is FAQ schema still worth adding?
The rich result ended in May 2026 and Search Console API support ended that August. The markup remains valid and is still parsed by other crawlers, so keep it where it matches visible content — just do not build a strategy on it.
How do we know if crawlers can actually reach us?
Check server logs rather than assuming. Robots directives, status codes, bot rate limiting and firewall rules all block crawlers silently, and none of them show up in a standard site audit tool.
Sources
Every figure on this page comes from one of the following. Where a claim is ours rather than a source’s, it carries an evidence label instead.
- OpenAI — bots and crawlers documentation. Source for the OAI-SearchBot and GPTBot distinction. Primary
- Google Search Central — Optimizing your website for generative AI features (published 15 May 2026, updated 10 July 2026). Source for the llms.txt, chunking and AI-schema positions, and for the statement that generative features run on core ranking systems. Primary
- Rankability — State of AI Search, 1,645 AI citation observations across 31 topics, 2026. Source for the 24.1% cross-platform overlap, the 73.5% ChatGPT exclusive citation rate, the 22.1% vs 8.7% first-100-words finding and the 43.3% vs 15.5% query-breadth finding. Independent study
- Searlixa sampling across client engagements. Any figure drawn from this carries an Observed label with its sample size and date. Our own
Ask an assistant
Hand this page to an assistant and ask it to summarise or challenge the argument. If it gets something wrong about us, that is itself a useful finding.
→What you are buying
Technical SEO services: what is included
Technical SEO agency work is mostly unglamorous and mostly first. This is what an engagement with us produces.
- Crawl and render audit against what search engines and assistants actually receive
- Indexation review: what is indexed, what should not be, and what is missing
- Canonical, sitemap, hreflang and robots policy checked and corrected
- Crawler policy set deliberately, with search discovery separated from training preference
- Core Web Vitals measured at the 75th percentile, not on your own laptop
- Fix list written as tickets your developers can pick up without translation
Who this is for
Sites where content and links are already in place but something is blocking the work from landing. Usually rendering, usually nobody knew.
Who it is not for
Sites with no content problem and no traffic. Technical work will not create demand that was never there.
From $900 a month. Technical work is usually front-loaded, so the first two months carry most of it and the rest is verification. SEO and AI visibility pricing is published in full.
The audit is the technical work in miniature. If it finds nothing, you have saved the cost of a retainer and we will tell you so. The $99 SEO and AI visibility audit comes back in three working days, and the fee comes off your first invoice if you continue.