You Can’t Rank in AI Search Without Technical SEO (Here’s Why)

“SEO is Dead!” – the rallying cry of SEO Sceptics echoes throughout the digital marketing world.

We’ve all been here before. Every few months there’s a new article proclaiming why SEO is (finally) dead. Unsurprisingly, most experienced SEOs will roll their eyes at the above statement. So, let’s be clear: SEO is not dead. There’s been a shift in the landscape, but the fundamental principles aren’t going anywhere.

How SEO is changing

It’s undeniable there have been changes to how people search in the last few years. With LLMs, AI Overviews, and now agentic commerce becoming more widespread we’re only going to see more of a shift away from traditional keyword-based SEO. Users expect the search engine to do the work for them reviewing and choosing the available content to find the most suitable and presenting it in a digestible format. Stop me if that sounds familiar…

But I’m not here to talk about the shift to intent based optimisation. Let’s not forget; keyword usage and content only make up part of the SEO puzzle. You can have the flashiest, most beautifully written content in the world, but it’s not going to get you anywhere if it’s inaccessible.

Crawlability remains a priority

Obviously then, crawlability remains the most important feature of a site when it comes to both SEO and GEO. You’ll only be surfaced or cited in LLMs and AI Search if they can access and read the content. As most crawlers won’t pass JavaScript you need to ensure all your important content is present in the raw html. Otherwise, all your well-written, user-friendly text will just end up being ignored.

The blocking of AI crawlers is another pain-point to focus on. Especially in the early days, many businesses tried to block their sites from being crawled using robots.txt. While data collection and copyright infringement is a tangled web, the basic fact for SEOs is that blocking AI-crawlers is only going to lead to them going to your competitors for their information.

Contextualisation is key

Context is everything, and this remains true in SEO. A large part of an SEO’s job is making sure everything on a site links and works together to improve the overall performance. How is your SAAS going to show its usefulness if you’re not already demonstrating that through a range of carefully curated case studies? How can a user know your product is right for them without reviews and buying guides?

Search engines operate along the same lines, valuing internal links, structured data, anchor text, <h> tags and meta data (and many other signals) to contextualise and understand every page it crawls. Schema in particular can be really useful for showing what your site covers and how it all links together and is pretty much designed for search engines.

LLMs may have a slightly different appreciation for these various bits of data with schema usage by AI being particularly contentious, but the fact remains; These are important for performing organically. You can’t expect isolated pages to perform as well as a well linked, organised site.

UX & CRO needs to be human focused

A final area to consider is the actual user experience of your site. An AI crawler isn’t going to know if your site is hard to understand from a human perspective. It’s only going to crawl and render what it sees in the HTML. It can’t tell that neon pink and mud brown isn’t necessarily the best colour scheme for a site.  That’s where SEOs remain vital.

We’re much better at interacting with a site, testing the forms, trying to access customer service and trying to navigate the messy middle of a purchase journey because we do it all the time outside of work.  AI may be able to give you a framework or generic recommendations for A/B testing, but it’s not yet at a stage where it can tell you what exactly is wrong it with your user journey.

In conclusion

To conclude this somewhat rambling article, lets start where we began; SEO is not dead, and it’s not going anywhere. Like all industries, its merely evolving and taking on new challenges and opportunities. As long as people search for information, SEO will still be relevant.