Capability 02 — SEO
The foundation nothing else works without.
AI visibility work sits directly on top of classical technical SEO. If a page cannot be crawled, rendered, indexed or understood, no amount of clever positioning rescues it. We do this part properly and without ceremony.
Position
Not a separate service. A prerequisite.
We do not sell SEO on its own, because a technical audit delivered into a company with nothing worth retrieving produces a tidy list of fixes and no commercial outcome. It is included in every engagement because every engagement needs it.
What changed for technical SEO in an AI search world
Less than people claim, with one real exception: the population of clients you need to be readable by has grown, and the new ones are less forgiving. Several AI crawlers execute little or no JavaScript, respect different robots tokens, and are more likely to be caught by bot-management rules written before they existed.
Severity is defined by consequence
A blocker prevents a commercially important page from being retrieved, rendered or indexed. High means measurable loss of visibility on tracked queries. Medium and low are hygiene. We label findings against this rubric so you can tell the difference between an emergency and a validator warning.
A defect and a finding worth your time are different things
Crawlers generate thousands of technically true observations. Most of them do not matter. We report the ones connected to a page someone is trying to buy from, and we say which tracked queries each one affects.
Coverage
What we check, and why it is on the list.
Crawl & index
Usually where the blockers are- robots.txt parsing, per-user-agent rules, and rules nobody remembers adding
- meta robots and x-robots-tag conflicts
- Index coverage against Search Console reality, not against assumptions
- Crawl traps: faceted parameters, infinite calendars, session ids
Status & redirects
Cheap to fix, quietly expensive to ignore- Redirect chains and loops
- Soft 404s returning 200 with an error page
- Canonical conflicts between tags, sitemaps and internal links
- Sitemap entries that no longer resolve
Rendering
High impact on AI retrievability- What is present in the raw HTML versus what needs JavaScript
- Client-side-only commercial content, which is the defect we find most often
- Hydration errors that blank out sections for non-browser clients
- Rendered versus fetched comparison on every key template
Architecture & linking
Slow to move, compounds- Click depth from home to commercially important pages
- Orphan pages and pages reachable only from a sitemap
- Anchor text distribution and internal link intent
- Hub and cluster structure against the topic model
On-page semantics
Direct input to extractability- Titles and descriptions that describe the page rather than the brand
- Heading outline that reflects document structure
- Entity naming in body copy — the product named, not referred to as “it”
- Duplicate, thin and stale content identification
Structured data
Clarity, not a ranking lever- Organization, Product, Service, SoftwareApplication, Article, Breadcrumb, Person, Review, LocalBusiness where relevant
- Validation errors and silently broken markup
- sameAs coverage linking the entity to its profiles
- Markup that contradicts the visible page, which is worse than no markup
Performance
Real, and routinely oversold- Core Web Vitals from field data where it exists, lab data where it does not
- Render-blocking resources on templates that matter commercially
- Mobile usability as experienced, not as scored
Evidence
Grounds every other finding- Search Console query and page data
- Log files where we can get them — the only direct record of what actually crawled you
- Analytics segmentation for organic and AI referral traffic
Position on Core Web Vitals
Useful, bounded, and over-marketed.
Page experience metrics measure something real: a slow, unstable page loses people. That is reason enough to care. What they are not is a lever you pull to overtake a better-established competitor in an answer engine.
Our position: fix the ones that are genuinely bad, particularly on templates people buy from, and stop there. We will tell you when a performance project is the highest value thing on your list, and we will tell you when it is an expensive way to avoid a harder conversation about content and authority.
See where you stand in AI search.
An AI Search Audit tells you how often AI systems name your company, who they name instead, and what is causing the gap. Every figure comes with the method behind it.