Technical SEO

Technical SEO used to mean fixing crawl errors and managing redirects. Now it means architecting your site for multiple audiences—human readers, Google's crawler, and AI agents that approach your content in fundamentally different ways. The fundamentals haven't vanished, but they've expanded. A page that ranks well in traditional search and converts human visitors can still fail the 30-second task completion test for an AI model pulling your content into a conversational interface. Your site infrastructure, markup, and content structure now need to serve readers, search systems, and extraction tools simultaneously.

The field is fragmenting in real time. Google is simultaneously tightening domain migration requirements while relaxing its stance on AI-specific markup and metadata—signaling both stricter enforcement of basics and acceptance that AI search is here. But the real tension is deeper: ranking in Google and getting cited by AI systems are no longer the same achievement. You can earn a search position while your content is mined to support a competitor's answer. B2B traffic patterns show this split sharpening—less volume, but higher-intent visitors, suggesting AI is filtering demand upstream. Meanwhile, AI agents and discovery mechanisms are emerging as their own citation paths, requiring new compliance thinking. The infrastructure you build now needs to handle personalized, agentic, and citation-driven discovery—not just traditional ranking.

Focus on audit work first: identify where AI-referred visitors actually arrive on your site, and whether they can complete their tasks. That's the real technical debt.