Pillar
Technical SEO
Crawling, indexing, speed and structured data. None of it makes your content good. All of it decides whether anyone — or anything — ever sees the good content you already have.
The limits, thresholds and crawler behavior here come from Google's own documentation, recorded in our ledger with the date we checked each one.
This is the least glamorous part of the job and the only part where the rules are actually written down.
Most of what follows is documented by the platforms, with real numbers and specific behavior. That makes it the easiest area to be certainly right in. It also makes it the easiest to get quietly, expensively wrong, because nothing tells you.
And it's now the price of admission for AI. A crawler fetching your page for an answer hits exactly the same walls a search crawler does.
What is technical SEO?
It's the work of making a site reachable, readable and fast enough that its content can be indexed and served — crawling, indexing, structure, speed, markup and crawler directives. It doesn't make your content better. It decides whether anything reaches your content at all.
It's mostly a solved problem with documented answers, which is why reading the documentation beats following advice.
Do it in this order
There's a dependency chain here, and working out of order wastes the effort.
- Can it be fetched? Robots rules, server responses, login walls.
- Can it be read? Rendering, JavaScript, semantic markup.
- Can it be indexed? Canonicals, duplicates, noindex, snippet rules.
- Can it be found? Internal links first, then sitemaps.
- Is it fast enough? Core Web Vitals, measured on real visits.
- Is it explicit? Structured data, spelling out what a machine would otherwise have to guess.
Teams start at step six constantly, because schema is interesting and crawl logs are not.
The snippet trap
One documented fact deserves top billing, because it costs sites their AI visibility silently.
Google says there's no extra requirement to show up in AI Overviews or AI Mode. A page qualifies if it's indexed and eligible to be shown in Search with a snippet. So nosnippet, data-nosnippet and a tight max-snippet don't just trim your search snippet — they take you out of the AI results too.
Plenty of sites set those for sensible reasons: stop a competitor scraping your definitions, push people to click through. That trade used to be close. It isn't anymore.
Crawlability & indexing
Crawling and indexing are two different things, and a page can fail at either one. Most diagnosis goes wrong by treating them as a single step.
Architecture & URLs
How your pages are organized decides how they get found, how authority moves between them, and whether anyone can tell what the site is about. URLs are the visible shape of that decision.
Sitemaps & robots
These two files are where confident wrong advice concentrates, probably because they look simple enough that nobody bothers checking the documentation.
Structured data
Markup won't rank your page and won't make a claim true. Its job is to state outright what a machine would otherwise have to work out by guessing.
Core Web Vitals
Three metrics with published thresholds, measured on real visits rather than a test you ran once. No interpretation needed. You either meet them or you don't.
AI crawler access
Letting AI crawlers read your site is a real decision with a real trade-off. Most advice about it mixes up controls that do completely different jobs.
JavaScript & rendering
Google can render JavaScript" is true, and it gets used to justify architectures that cause real problems. The useful questions are when rendering happens, how reliably, and who else is looking.