Does AEO need technical SEO?
In the current age of AI, technical SEO is often treated as an afterthought, and that is wrong.
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Throughout my consulting career, I have pushed back against the importance many agencies place on technical SEO. I was never a fan of how most SEO engagements began with an expensive audit that produced endless to-do lists without yielding meaningful increases in traffic.
But now the pendulum has swung the other way. In the current age of AI, technical SEO is often treated as an afterthought, and that is wrong. The argument being made in every LinkedIn thread and way too many expert posts that LLMs are so good at reading content that they don’t need a site to be structured well is going to cause some major issues.
The fact that this even needs to be said reflects how badly the SEO industry has conflated the sophistication of LLMs with the idea that those systems somehow no longer need to crawl the web.
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Traditional SEO is alive and well
First off, much of this thinking assumes that SEO is dead and that only AEO matters. If you read my newsletter weekly, you know that this premise is, of course, false. But, even for AEO, you need technical SEO because much of what will show up in an LLM will build off what is in the search index. Without SEO, there is no AEO.
What’s unfortunate is how widespread the argument that technical SEO is not needed has become. I’ve heard this statement from CMOs, from content teams, and from agency people who have been selling content retainers for years and would very much prefer that the technical work not matter. A big reason for this is the lack of strategic technical talent; they actually can’t address the stakeholders’ needs, so they brush it off as unnecessary.
Technical SEO issues can be powerful
A couple of years ago, I was working with a global brand that had a serious organic visibility problem that no one on their team could explain, even though the content was genuinely good, with real depth on the right topics.
When we dug into the site's actual technical state, the problem wasn’t the content at all, nor was it the brand. The real issue was that the site had been built up over a decade of good intentions and no architectural discipline, with every product category using its own logic for URL construction: underscores, hyphens, dates embedded in the URL, and a hierarchy that didn’t reflect anything a user or a crawler would recognize as intentional.
Category pages competed with product pages for the same queries; the internal linking was random, conveying little to no signal about what the site was authoritative about, and the canonicalization was a mess of migration decisions made over the years with minimal SEO input.
We didn’t touch the content because it was fine; instead, we rebuilt the URL architecture from the ground up, established a coherent internal linking model that reinforced subject and product clusters, and cleaned up the canonicalization so the site would finally send consistent signals about which pages mattered. This brand also had a small international audience, so, for added measure, we developed an internal strategy to give them a foundation to build on as we expanded into other countries.
This effort was extremely successful, and the lift came almost entirely from that structural work, without a single new article written, just the site finally communicating clearly to crawlers what it was about and which pages deserved to rank. To be transparent, there was a ton of pushback because the risk to traffic was tremendous, given that we were changing nearly every URL. What finally got the green light was my explanation that, since we were so close to the bottom, the only direction was up.
This brand is doing very well in LLMs, but I don’t think that would be the case had they not addressed their underlying architecture that was hurting their SEO.
That story is not unusual in my experience, and the consistent pattern across every company I’ve worked with is that when a technically sound site underperforms, content, the brand is usually the problem, but when a content-rich site underperforms in a way that it shouldn’t due to brand signals, it is worth looking at the technical architecture.
Here is the technical seo you should focus on today.
Rendering
Rendering is actually one of the places where the AI era has made technical SEO more consequential than it was before, because most AI crawlers are lightweight systems that are not running a full browser stack and executing JavaScript the way Chrome would, which means that if your content only exists after a React component renders it client-side, a meaningful portion of the AI crawl ecosystem is simply not reading it. This was a manageable problem when Googlebot was the primary crawler you were optimizing for, because you could at least rely on Google’s JavaScript rendering queue even when it was slow, but it’s a harder problem now because you’re dealing with a fragmented set of crawlers with different capabilities. When it comes to search, Google will be dominant, but if you are focusing on AEO, every model might matter.
Canonicals
A page with conflicting canonicalization signals would never make it cleanly into any crawl index because the model doesn’t know what to rank. When it comes to inclusion rather than ranking, this is an important area to clean up. Look at your Google Search Console report, find those duplicates, and fix your canonicals.
Internal links
Internal links are the closest thing to explicit editorial judgment that a crawler can observe, and most sites treat them as an afterthought. Internal linking ends up being something put in recent posts to link to old content, but not to link new content to old. The topical relationships of content are critical when it comes to showcasing a site as an expert, so this is something you want to get right.
An e-commerce site where the product team owns the product pages and the content team owns the blog will almost always have an internal link graph that reflects that organizational divide, with each section linking internally within its own domain and almost never across it, which is a structural problem that communicates to crawlers that these two bodies of content have nothing to do with each other even when they are obviously about the same product.
The fix is not complicated, but it requires someone to proactively make these adjustments.
Crawl budget and crawl efficiency
Crawl budget for most sites isn’t that big of an issue because Google will crawl nearly every page on a site. AI crawlers are not Google and do not have Google’s infrastructure or its tolerance for crawling inefficiency, so even smaller sites want to conserve crawl budget.
A site that wastes AI crawler visits on paginated archives, session-ID URL variants, filtered search result pages, and duplicate tracking parameter strings that were never cleaned up is destroying its crawl efficiency. Crawlers will eventually deprioritize this site relative to cleaner sources that return useful content on the first crawl.
Technical SEO was never about tricking algorithms. It was always about making sure the work you did was actually readable by the systems that decide whether it matters. Fix your basic technical SEO, and you'll set the right foundation for AEO.
I've spent years arguing that SEO is a product problem, not a content problem. The AI era has just made the proof obvious. If your site can't be crawled cleanly, no amount of good writing will fix it, and an LLM won't do you the favor of working around your architecture.
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Great article Eli... everyone is talking about creating great content for AI search, but this article perfectly explains why our "technical foundation" matters more than ever.
If the bots can't crawl us efficiently, our great content won't even make it into the LLM's in the first place!