In the event you’re a CMO, I really feel your ache. For years, a long time even, model visibility has largely been an website positioning arms race in opposition to your rivals. After which alongside comes ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude, to not point out Google’s new AI-powered search options: AI Mode and AI Overviews. Abruptly, you’ve additionally obtained to consider your brand’s visibility in AI-generated responses as properly.
Sadly, the technical shortcuts that helped your model adapt rapidly and keep aggressive over time have almost definitely left you with varied legacy points. This gathered technical website positioning debt may doubtlessly devastate your AI visibility.
In fact, each legacy challenge or technical drawback could have an answer. However your greatest problem in addressing your technical website positioning debt isn’t complexity or incompetence; it’s assumption.
Assumptions are the white ants in your search technique, hollowing out the group’s techniques and finest efforts. All the pieces may nonetheless appear structurally sound on the floor as a result of all of the harm is going on contained in the partitions of the home, or between the strains of your website positioning targets and workflows. However then comes that horrific day when somebody inadvertently applies just a little further strain within the fallacious spot and the whole thing caves in.
The brand new calls for of AI search are making use of that strain proper now. How stable is your technical website positioning?
Robust Search Rankings ≠ AI Visibility
Some of the harmful assumptions you can also make is pondering that, as a result of your website ranks properly sufficient in Google, the technical foundations should be sound. So, if the various search engines don’t have any drawback crawling your website and indexing your content material, the identical must also be true for AI, proper?
Improper.
Okay, there are literally a few assumptions in there. However that’s typically the best way: One assumption offers the deceptive context that results in others, and the white ants begin chewing your partitions.
Let’s cope with that second assumption first: In case your website ranks properly in Google, it ought to get pleasure from related visibility in AI.
We just lately in contrast Ahrefs knowledge for 2 main lodging web sites: Airbnb and Vrbo.
After we take a look at non-branded search, each web sites have seen a downward pattern since July. The latest knowledge level we’ve (Oct. 13-15, 2025) has Airbnb exhibiting up in ~916,304 searches and Vrbo exhibiting up in ~615,497. That’s a ratio of roughly 3:2.
Picture from creator, October 2025However after we take a look at estimated ChatGPT mentions (September 2025), Airbnb has ~8,636, whereas Vrbo has solely ~1,573. That’s a ratio of ~11:2.
Picture from creator, October 2025I ought to add a caveat at this level that any AI-related datasets are early and modeled, so must be taken as indicative slightly than absolute. Nevertheless, the info suggests Vrbo seems far much less in AI solutions (and ChatGPT specifically) than you’d count on if there was any correlation with search rankings.
Due to Vrbo’s presence in Google’s natural search outcomes, it does have a modest presence in Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode. That’s as a result of Google’s AI options nonetheless largely draw on the identical search infrastructure.
And that’s the important thing challenge right here: Search engines like google aren’t the one ones sending crawlers to your web site. And you’ll’t assume AI crawlers work in the identical method.
AI Search Magnifies Your Technical website positioning Debt
So, what about that first assumption: In case your website ranks tremendous in Google, any technical debt should be negligible.
Google’s search infrastructure is extremely subtle, taking in a a lot wider array of indicators than AI crawlers at the moment do. The cumulative impact of all these indicators can masks or compensate for small quantities of technical debt.
For instance, a web page with well-optimized copy, strong schema markup, and first rate authority may nonetheless rank larger than a competitor’s, even when your web page hundreds barely slower.
Most AI crawlers don’t work that method. They strip away code, formatting, and schema markup to ingest solely the uncooked textual content. With fewer different indicators to stability issues out, something that hinders the crawler’s means to entry your content material could have a higher affect in your AI visibility. There’s nowhere in your technical debt to cover.
The Want For Pace
Let’s take a look at simply one of the crucial widespread types of technical website positioning debt: web page velocity.
Sub-optimal web page velocity hardly ever has a single trigger. It’s normally right down to a mix of things – bloated code, inefficient CSS, giant JavaScript bundles, outsized photos and media information, poor infrastructure, and extra – with every occasion including just a bit extra drag on how rapidly the web page hundreds in a typical browser.
Sure, we may very well be speaking fractions of a second right here and there, however the accumulation of points can have a damaging affect on the consumer expertise. For this reason sooner web sites will typically rank larger; Google treats web page velocity as a direct rating consider search.
Web page velocity additionally seems to be a big consider how typically content material seems in Google’s new AI Mode.
Dan Taylor recently crunched the data on 2,138 web sites showing as citations in AI Mode responses to see if there was any correlation between how typically they have been cited and their LCP and CLA scores. What he discovered was a transparent drop-off in AI Mode citations for web sites with slower load instances.
Picture from creator, October 2025
Picture from creator, October 2025We additionally checked out one other well-liked methodology web site homeowners use to evaluate web page velocity: Google’s PageSpeed Insights (PSI) device. This aggregates a bunch of metrics, together with the above two alongside many extra, to generate an total rating out of 100. Nevertheless, we discovered no correlation between PSI scores and citations in AI Mode.
So, whereas PageSpeed Insights can provide you helpful diagnostic info, figuring out the assorted points impacting your load instances, your website’s Core Net Vitals are a extra dependable indicator of how rapidly and effectively website guests and crawlers can entry your content material.
I do know what you’re pondering: This knowledge is confined to Google’s AI Mode. It doesn’t inform us something about whether or not the identical is true for visibility in different AI platforms.
We at the moment lack any publicly obtainable knowledge to check the identical principle for different agentic assistant instruments resembling ChatGPT, however the clues are all there.
Crawling Comes At A Price
Again in July, OpenAI’s Sam Altman informed Axios that ChatGPT receives 2.5 billion consumer prompts on daily basis. For comparability, SparkToro estimates Google serves ~16.4 billion search queries per day.
The big language mannequin (LLM) powering every AI platform responds to a immediate in two methods:
- Drawing on its giant pool of coaching knowledge.
- Sending out bots or crawlers to confirm and complement the data with knowledge from further sources in actual time.
ChatGPT’s real-time crawler is named ChatGPT-Consumer. On the time of writing, the earlier seven days noticed ChatGPT-Consumer go to the SALT.company web site ~6,000 instances. In the identical interval, Google’s search crawler, Googlebot, accessed our web site ~2,500 instances.
Dealing with billions of prompts every day consumes an enormous quantity of processing energy. OpenAI estimates that its present enlargement plans would require 10 gigawatts of power, which is roughly the output of 10 nuclear reactors.
Every a type of 6,000 crawls of the SALT web site drew on these computational sources. Nevertheless, a sluggish or inefficient web site forces the crawler to burn much more of these sources.
As the quantity of prompts continues to develop, the cumulative price of all this crawling will solely get larger. Sooner or later, the AI platforms could have no alternative however to enhance the associated fee effectivity of their crawlers (in the event that they haven’t already), shunning these web sites requiring extra sources to crawl in favor of these that are fast and straightforward to entry and skim.
Why ought to ChatGPT waste sources crawling sluggish web sites when it could actually extract the identical or related info from extra environment friendly websites with far much less trouble?
Is Your Website Already Invisible To AI?
All of the above assumes the AI crawler can entry your web site within the first place. Because it seems, even that isn’t assured.
In July this 12 months, Cloudflare (one of many world’s largest content material supply networks) began blocking AI crawlers by default. This resolution doubtlessly impacts the AI visibility of thousands and thousands of internet sites.
Cloudflare first gave web site homeowners the power to dam AI crawlers in September 2024, and greater than 1 million prospects selected to just do that. The new pay-per-crawl feature takes this a step additional, permitting paid customers of Cloudflare to decide on which crawlers they’ll permit and on what phrases.
Nevertheless, the distinction now’s that blocking AI crawlers is not opt-in. If you need your web site and content material to be seen in AI, that you must decide out; assuming you’re conscious of the modifications, after all.
In case your website runs on Cloudflare infrastructure and also you haven’t explicitly checked your settings just lately, there’s an honest likelihood your web site may now be invisible to ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity. Not as a result of your content material isn’t ok. Not as a result of your technical website positioning is poor. However as a result of a third-party platform made an infrastructure resolution that immediately impacts your visibility, and also you won’t even understand it occurred.
That is the uncomfortable actuality CMOs have to face: You may’t assume what works at this time will work tomorrow. You may’t even assume that choices affecting your AI visibility will all the time occur inside your organisation.
And when a change like this does occur, you completely can’t assume another person is dealing with it.
Who Is Accountable?
Most technical website positioning points could have an answer, however you’ve obtained to concentrate on the issue within the first place. That requires two issues:
- Somebody chargeable for figuring out and highlighting these points.
- Somebody with the required expertise and experience to repair them.
Spelled out like this, my level might sound a tad patronizing. However be sincere, may you identify the particular person(s) chargeable for these in your group? Who would you say is chargeable for proactively and autonomously figuring out and elevating Cloudflare’s new pay-per-crawl coverage with you? And would they agree together with your expectation if you happen to requested them?
Oh, and don’t cop out by claiming the duty lies together with your exterior website positioning companions. Businesses may proactively advise shoppers each time there’s “a serious disturbance within the Drive,” resembling a pending Google replace. However does your contract with them embody monitoring each facet of your infrastructure, together with third-party providers? And does this duty prolong to bettering your AI visibility on high of the standard website positioning actions? Until that is explicitly spelled out, there’s no motive to imagine they’re actively making certain all the assorted AI crawlers can entry your website.
In brief, most technical website positioning debt occurs as a result of everybody assumes it’s another person’s job.
The CMO assumes it’s the developer’s duty. It’s all code, proper? The builders ought to know the web site must rank in search and be seen in AI. Absolutely, they’ll implement technical website positioning finest follow by default.
However builders aren’t technical website positioning consultants in precisely the identical method they’re not internet designers or UX specialists. They’ll construct what they’re briefed to construct. They’ll prioritize what you inform them to prioritize.
In consequence, the dev group assumes it’s as much as the website positioning group to flag any new technical modifications. However the website positioning group assumes all is properly as a result of final quarter’s technical audit, primarily based on the identical checklist of checks they’ve relied on for years, didn’t determine something amiss. And everyone assumes that, if there have been going to be any points with AI visibility, another person would have raised it by now.
This confusion all helps technical debt to build up, unseen and unchecked.
→ Learn extra: Why Your SEO Isn’t Working, And It’s Not The Team’s Fault
Cease Assuming And Begin Doing
The perfect time to forestall white ants from consuming the partitions in your house is earlier than you understand they’re there. Wait till the issues are apparent, and the expense of fixing all of the harm will far outweigh the prices of an preliminary inspection and some precautionary measures.
In the identical method, don’t wait till it turns into apparent that your model’s visibility in AI is compromised. Carry out the required inspections now. Establish and repair any technical points now which may trigger points for AI crawlers.
An enormous a part of this might be robust communication between your groups, with accountabilities that clarify who’s chargeable for monitoring and actioning every issue contributing to your total visibility in AI.
In the event you don’t, any funding and energy your group places into optimizing model content material for AI may very well be wasted.
Cease assuming tomorrow will work like at this time. Technical website positioning debt will affect your AI visibility. That’s not up for debate. The true query is whether or not you’ll proactively handle your technical website positioning debt now or wait till the assumptions trigger your on-line visibility to crumble.
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