Technical SEO For AI Search: What Your Developer Should Check

Your website may explain your services beautifully, but that only helps search discovery if the relevant pages can be reached and read.

Technical SEO is the work that checks those foundations. For a business owner, the useful question is not “Have we added an AI feature?” It is “Can people and search systems find the information we want them to understand?”

You do not need to diagnose code yourself. You need a clear brief, evidence from the checks and a sensible order of work.

Start With Your Most Useful Pages

Give your developer a short list of important pages: the services you sell, relevant case studies, key products and answers customers regularly need.

Ask for page-specific findings. A general site score can hide a problem on the page that matters most to your business.

Include any recent changes, such as a redesign, new hosting, a renamed service or a change to how content is published. This gives the team a starting point for investigation without assuming what caused the issue.

Can Search Engines Reach Them?

Google's technical requirements include access for its crawler, a successful page response and content it can index. Meeting those requirements makes a page eligible, not guaranteed to appear.

Ask your developer to check for accidental blocks, error responses and indexing instructions on the intended public pages. Request examples from Search Console's inspection tools rather than relying only on how the page looks in a browser.

Keep the distinction between public and private content clear. Login pages, customer information and staging sites should not be exposed just to satisfy an audit score.

Is The Important Information Readable?

Service descriptions, product details and useful answers should be available as text, not only embedded in a promotional image.

For interactive pages, ask the team to check what information is available when the page loads and what depends on a visitor clicking or searching. A person may understand how to reveal something that an automated system does not access in the same way.

Your developer should test the actual output of your website, not simply identify the framework it uses. Ask them to show that the important words and links are present.

Are There Clear Routes Between Related Pages?

A useful guide should connect naturally to the service or product it explains. A case study should be reachable from the relevant portfolio or service page.

Google's link guidance explains that links help it discover pages and understand their context. Descriptive link text also tells a visitor what to expect before opening the destination.

Ask the team to identify important pages with no incoming internal links, broken destinations and navigation that depends on unreliable interactions. Fix those routes because they serve a real purpose, not to add links everywhere.

Does The Extra Page Information Match The Page?

Structured data is additional information that describes a page in a format search engines can process. It might identify an article, a product or the organisation behind a website.

It should describe what is genuinely present and accurate. Do not add invented reviews, claims or details just to complete a template.

Google's structured data guidance explains its role in understanding content and eligibility for supported search features. It is not a promise of an enhanced result or an AI citation.

Avoid Buying An AI Shortcut

For Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, established SEO requirements still apply. Google's AI features guidance does not require special AI markup or a new machine-readable file.

Other services have their own policies. Ask anyone making a cross-platform claim which platform, documented requirement and observed result they mean.

Being technically accessible is only a starting point. Your pages still need clear answers, relevant evidence and accurate business information.

Ask For A Prioritised Handover

A useful review should tell you which pages are affected, what was observed, what needs changing and how the fix will be checked.

Separate urgent access problems from useful improvements and speculative experiments. Agree who owns each action and what can safely wait.

That gives your team something concrete to work on, while keeping the real objective in sight: a website that helps prospective customers understand you and take the next step.