It’s no secret that AI is transforming search. Google’s AI Mode is rolling out, while tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity are quickly becoming go-to search engines. This shift toward AI search is reshaping how we need to think about and approach technical SEO.
How AI Search Changes Technical SEO: 3 Key Shifts
- It’s no longer just about Googlebot. Bots from OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic, Perplexity and other AI tools are actively crawling and summarizing content. These bots now influence our customers and their buying decisions.
- There are more bot behaviors to optimize for. Technical SEO now means optimizing websites for six distinct behaviors: discovery, crawling, rendering, indexing, training, and interaction. This requires more investment in improving a website’s technical foundations.
- Bots are no longer passive observers. Interactive AI bots, like ChatGPT-User, are actively visiting and interacting with websites on behalf of people. Agentic bots capable of making decisions and completing tasks autonomously are quickly emerging.
The New Approach to Technical SEO
We need to adapt our technical SEO practices to support AI search. This series breaks down the six critical bot behaviors shaping the future of SEO and explains how to optimize your site for each one:
- Discovery: How bots find your website’s content
- Crawling: How bots retrieve content from your site
- Rendering: How bots process your site’s code to “see” what’s on the page
- Indexing: How bots store and retrieve content for search and AI responses
- Training: How your site content feeds large language models (LLMs)
- Interaction: How bots and AI agents engage with your site on behalf of users
Have Questions or Want Help?
At Elementive, we’re actively working with clients to audit AI search visibility, measure bot interaction, improve how AI agents interact with websites, and identify opportunities for optimization. If you’d like to evaluate how bots are using your site and how to improve your SEO and AI search performance, let’s connect.