AI-friendly technical SEO: building a solid foundation to appear in AI engines

After running an audit of your AI visibility and identifying where you stand in the answer engine ecosystem, it’s time to take action. And it all starts with a fundamental, often underestimated task: the technical optimization of your website. In a world where ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or Gemini are becoming major entry points for information, the rules of SEO are evolving. It’s no longer enough to have well-written content or well-placed keywords: your website must also be technically flawless to be understood, explored, and valued by AIs.

Why? Because generative artificial intelligences rely on sources they consider reliable, well-structured, and technically accessible. They scan the web with logic that differs from Google: they assess the clarity of your data, the consistency of your tags, loading speed, presence of structured data… In short, they need to understand your site—not just read it.

This is where AI-friendly technical SEO comes into play—a discipline that combines classic SEO best practices (speed, security, mobile accessibility) with the specific requirements of AI engines (semantic data, alternative indexing, contextual understanding…).

This approach is built around three key pillars:

1. Solid technical foundations: speed, HTTPS, responsiveness, clean URL structure, absence of errors…
2. Good crawlability by alternative engines used by AIs, such as Bing or Common Crawl.
3. Rigorous implementation of structured data (schema.org) to tag your content in a way that is understandable and usable.

In this article, you’ll discover a clear, practical, and actionable method to optimize each of these areas. The goal? To make your website technically eligible for AI-generated answers, and boost your visibility in the new engines of the web.

Ready to build a site that speaks the language of artificial intelligence? Let’s dive in.

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1. Revisit the basics of technical SEO: the essential checklist to be AI-ready

Before aiming for visibility in AI-generated answers from tools like ChatGPT or Claude, you need to lay down solid technical foundations. Because if your site suffers from slow loading times, indexing issues, or poor architecture, no AI will take the risk of relying on your content.

In other words, a poorly optimized site is an invisible site—for Google as well as for AI engines.

Here is the essential checklist to ensure your site has a healthy technical base:

• Fast loading speed: your site should load in under 2.5 seconds—ideally under 2 seconds on mobile. Test using PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix.
• Secure connection (HTTPS): critical for building user trust, and also for AIs that prioritize secure sources.
• Responsive, mobile-first design: modern AIs and search engines crawl the mobile version first. If your site isn’t optimized for mobile, it will be penalized.
• Clean URL structure: avoid overly long URLs, unnecessary numbers, or special characters. A good URL is short, descriptive, and stable.
• No redirect chains: too many redirects hurt both user experience and indexability.
• Zero indexing errors: fix all 404s, 500s, or soft 404 errors. Use Google Search Console or audit tools to detect them.
• Properly configured robots.txt file: this file tells bots what they can or cannot crawl. It should be clear and free of accidental blocks.
• Up-to-date and submitted XML sitemap: helps AIs and search engines better explore your key pages.

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💡 Pro tip: you don’t need to be a developer to run this audit. Tools like Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, Sitebulb, or SE Ranking offer complete, easy-to-read reports. In just a few clicks, you can identify blockers and fix them with the help of a developer or technical freelancer.

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The goal here isn’t technological perfection, but to eliminate the most common obstacles that prevent AIs from recognizing and using your content. A fast, clear, secure, and well-structured site already gives you a significant edge in the AI SEO ecosystem.

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2. Optimize crawlability for AIs and secondary search engines

When we talk about indexing, the natural reflex is to think of Google. However, in the world of AI SEO, limiting yourself to Google would be a strategic mistake. In reality, generative artificial intelligences (LLMs) don’t rely exclusively on Google to collect and analyze web data.

They also leverage alternative data sources, which are often more open, quicker to index, and better suited to their language-processing logic. Among the most important sources are:

• Bing, which powers ChatGPT, Copilot, and even DuckDuckGo
• Common Crawl, a massive, freely accessible web database used notably by OpenAI and Anthropic
• The Wayback Machine, a web archive used to validate content history and longevity

2.1 Register your website with Bing webmaster tools

Why Bing? Because Microsoft is directly involved in the development of several generative AIs, including ChatGPT, via Azure and Bing. If you want your content to be understood by these AIs, it needs to be accessible in Bing’s index.

➡️ Create your account on Bing Webmaster Tools

Two easy options to connect your site:

• Automatic import from your Google Search Console account (quick and easy)
• Manual setup via HTML tag, XML file, or DNS record

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Bing is known to index new content faster than Google. A real advantage for reactive content creators or those who publish regularly.

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2.2 Allow common crawl in your robots.txt file

Common Crawl is one of the most widely used text data sources in the AI world. It’s an open-source project that indexes billions of web pages each month. It also serves as a training source for AIs like GPT, Claude, Mistral, or Meta Llama.

To make your site accessible to Common Crawl, add this line to your robots.txt file:

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User-agent: CCBot
Disallow:

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This means: “CCBot (the Common Crawl bot) is allowed to crawl all pages of the site.”

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💡 Important: Double-check that other directives in your robots.txt file aren’t unintentionally blocking important sections of your site.

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🎯 Strategic focus: what should be made accessible?

Not everything needs (or should) be exposed. Focus on your high-value content:

• Pillar pages for your main topic
• In-depth guides or long-form articles
• Comparison pages or expert summaries
• Industry- or profession-specific service pages

The idea is simple: make your best content accessible where AIs go to find reliable information.

✅ By smartly opening access to these alternative indexing sources, you greatly increase your chances of being noticed, cited, and integrated into AI-generated responses. It’s a small technical effort for a massive visibility boost… in the digital ecosystem of tomorrow.

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3. Implement structured data for AI-friendly understanding

If you want artificial intelligences to fully understand the nature and content of your pages, it’s not enough to just “write like a human.” You also need to speak the language of algorithms.

That’s where structured data, also known as schema.org, comes in. It allows you to encapsulate your content in a format that is readable and interpretable by AIs, while also enhancing its display in search engines.

Why is structured data essential for AI SEO?

• It clarifies the type of content: article, product, FAQ, recipe, event…
• It helps generate rich snippets in Google, Bing, and others (stars, prices, Q&As, images…)
• It enables AIs like ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Claude to detect your content as a trustworthy source to answer users’ questions

In short, it improves your semantic clarity, increasing your chances of appearing in AI-generated direct answers.

The 3 priority types of structured data to implement

1. FAQ: answer specific questions

FAQ blocks are ideal for responding clearly and directly to both user intent… and AI interpretation.

Here’s an example of JSON-LD markup to insert into your page’s HTML:

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1{
2  "@context": "https://schema.org",
3  "@type": "FAQPage",
4  "mainEntity": [
5    {
6      "@type": "Question",
7      "name": "Pourquoi choisir [nom de votre produit] ?",
8      "acceptedAnswer": {
9        "@type": "Answer",
10        "text": "[Avantage principal du produit] avec [preuve sociale ou chiffre clé]."
11      }
12    }
13  ]
14}

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💡 Tip: take inspiration from FAQs that already appear in Position 0 in the SERPs and adapt them to your content.

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Not sure how to build schema markup? We’ve summarized everything you need to know in an article on schemas and how it works!

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2. Articles & expert content: establish authority

For long-form content (guides, studies, blog posts…), clearly indicate to AIs that it’s editorial content. Example:

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1{
2  "@context": "https://schema.org",
3  "@type": "Article",
4  "headline": "Titre de l’article",
5  "author": {
6    "@type": "Person",
7    "name": "Nom de l’auteur"
8  },
9  "publisher": {
10    "@type": "Organization",
11    "name": "Nom de l’entreprise"
12  },
13  "datePublished": "2025-04-04"
14}

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This markup strengthens the legitimacy of your content as a reliable editorial source—a major plus in the eyes of AI engines.

3. Products: enhance your E-commerce listings

If you sell products online, implementing the Product markup is a must. It helps AIs (and Google) understand the commercial nature of the page and extract key data.

Example:

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1{
2  "@context": "https://schema.org",
3  "@type": "Product",
4  "name": "Nom du produit",
5  "image": "https://www.votresite.com/image-produit.jpg",
6  "description": "Description synthétique et claire du produit.",
7  "brand": {
8    "@type": "Brand",
9    "name": "Nom de votre marque"
10  }
11}

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Also consider adding other relevant fields like price, offers, aggregateRating, or review to further enrich how your product appears in the SERPs.

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Have a multilingual site? No worries—we’ve created an article on multilingual schemas! A simple script lets you switch schema languages for even more impact.

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Practical tips to maximize the SEO impact of your markup

• Add an SEO-optimized summary at the end of each article: clear, concise, and keyword-rich
• Use consistent heading tags (H1, H2, H3…), lists, and tables to structure your content
• Include key data, statistics, client case studies, or cited quotes
• Test your markup using Google Rich Results Test to ensure it’s valid
• Leverage ChatGPT or WordPress plugins like Rank Math or Yoast SEO to automatically generate JSON-LD

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Is your website ready for AI?

Technical SEO is no longer just a prerequisite to please Google—it’s now a non-negotiable condition for being visible to generative artificial intelligences.

By structuring your website to be fast, clean, readable, and understandable, you not only improve its indexability, but also increase its chances of being integrated into automated responses from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini… and the search engines of tomorrow.

What to remember from this article

1. A solid technical foundation: speed, security, mobile optimization, clean URLs… the essentials are non-negotiable
2. A strategic opening to Bing and Common Crawl: two key indexing sources for AIs
3. Clear structured data: your content must “speak AI” using precise JSON-LD markup

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🎯 The real challenge is no longer just being visible on Google—it’s being recognized as a trusted source by AI systems. And the good news? You have 100% control over these elements.