The Technical AEO Checklist: Speed, Schema, and Structure

Crawlers, AI or otherwise, work within limited time and resources, so slow or unreliable servers make it harder for them to fetch your pages completely. Ensure your Core Web Vitals are passing; per Google's Core Web Vitals guidance on web.dev, a good experience means LCP within 2.5 seconds, INP of 200 milliseconds or less, and CLS of 0.1 or less. Beyond user-facing metrics, keep your server response time low and implement efficient caching so repeat crawls are fast. Most important for AI visibility: do not depend on client-side JavaScript for core content. Vercel's analysis of AI crawler traffic found that none of the major AI crawlers it studied, including OpenAI's and Anthropic's, render JavaScript. Server-side rendering (SSR) or static generation ensures that your content is available in the initial HTML response. Compress images and use modern formats (WebP, AVIF) to reduce page weight. The technical foundations of AEO start with making your content fast and accessible to every crawler.

Implement these schema types across your site using JSON-LD, the format Google recommends (it can sit in the <head> or <body>). Global schemas (every page): Organization, WebSite, BreadcrumbList. Content page schemas: Article (for blog posts) and, optionally, FAQPage for visible FAQ content. Google no longer shows FAQ or How-to rich results (How-to was retired in 2023 and FAQ in May 2026, per the Search Central changelog), so treat these as clarity markup rather than a search feature. Product schemas: Product with Offer, AggregateRating, and detailed specifications. Local schemas: LocalBusiness with geo coordinates, hours, and service area. Validate every implementation using both Google's Rich Results Test and the Schema Markup Validator, and only mark up content that is visible on the page. Ensure nested schemas are properly connected — for example, your Article schema should reference your Organization schema as the publisher. Use sameAs properties to link to authoritative external profiles. See our comprehensive structured data for AEO guide for implementation details.

Your HTML structure directly affects how AI systems parse your content. Use semantic HTML5 elements: <article> for main content, <section> for logical divisions, <nav> for navigation, <header> and <footer> for their respective content. Use a clean heading hierarchy: one H1 per page, H2 for main sections, H3 for subsections. Never skip heading levels. Use question phrasing for headings where natural. Structure tables with proper <thead>, <tbody>, and <th> elements — AI models extract tabular data more reliably from well-structured HTML tables. Add descriptive alt text to all images. Use ordered and unordered lists for sequential and non-sequential information. Ensure your robots.txt allows the AI crawlers that power answer engines, and know which token controls what. OpenAI uses OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT search results, GPTBot for model training, and ChatGPT-User for user-initiated visits. Anthropic uses ClaudeBot for training, Claude-SearchBot for search quality, and Claude-User when a person asks Claude something. Perplexity uses PerplexityBot to surface and link sites in its search results and Perplexity-User for user actions. Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode rely on normal Googlebot crawling; Google-Extended is only a robots.txt token controlling use for Gemini training and grounding, and it does not affect Google Search. Optionally, publish an llms.txt file, a Markdown summary of your site with links to key pages, as described in the llms.txt proposal. It is not required by Google: its guidance on AI features in Search says you don't need new machine-readable or AI text files to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode.

Technical AEO is not a one-time project — it requires ongoing monitoring. Set up automated checks for schema validity using Screaming Frog or a similar crawler on a weekly schedule. Monitor your server logs for AI crawler activity: OAI-SearchBot, GPTBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, and other AI user agents. (Google-Extended will not appear in logs, because Google crawls with its existing user agents.) Track crawl frequency and ensure it is stable or increasing. If AI crawl frequency drops, investigate potential causes: increased page load times, server errors, or robots.txt changes. Implement automated alerts for Core Web Vitals regressions. Periodically validate your llms.txt file against the evolving specification. Run the AEO Grader monthly to catch any technical issues affecting your AI visibility. For the broader strategic context of these technical efforts, see our AEO content strategy framework.