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SEO & AEO

Technical SEO

Also known as: technical optimisation · site technical SEO

Definition

Technical SEO is the work of making a website easy for search engines to crawl, render and index. It covers site structure, status codes, redirects, speed, mobile rendering, canonical and hreflang tags, and structured data.

Work in order. Access comes first: can bots reach the pages. Then index control, so the right pages are in and the wrong ones are out. Then duplicates and canonicals, then speed and rendering, and last the enhancements such as structured data. Technical SEO removes obstacles and does not create demand, so a perfect technical score with no useful content ranks for very little.

Typical findings are blocked or noindexed pages that should be live, redirect chains, broken internal links, duplicate addresses from parameters, missing canonicals, slow templates, content that only appears through JavaScript, and wrong hreflang. On bilingual UAE sites the recurring ones are language pairs that don't point back at each other, switchers that crawlers cannot follow, and redirects that choose a language for the visitor.

It matters most at moments of change. A redesign or migration that changes addresses without redirects can lose rankings that took years to earn, and a large site can waste crawling on endless filter addresses. Most fixes need a developer, so a report is worth only what gets done: every finding should have an owner and a date. A long list of automated warnings is noise. The few that block crawling or indexing are the work.

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AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation)

AEO is the practice of structuring content and data so AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews cite a business as a source when answering questions, including when no click follows.

AI citation

An AI citation is a reference to a source inside an AI-generated answer, usually a named link to the page the assistant drew on. A brand can also be mentioned without a link, and an answer can use a page without crediting it.

AI crawlers

AI crawlers are automated programs run by AI companies that fetch web pages, either to gather material for training models or to find content for an answer. Examples include OpenAI's GPTBot, Anthropic's ClaudeBot and Perplexity's PerplexityBot. Google-Extended is a robots.txt control rather than a separate crawler.

AI SEO

AI SEO is a label for two different jobs: getting a business cited or mentioned in answers from AI search tools, and using AI tools to do SEO work faster. Which one a speaker means decides what is actually being sold.

AI visibility

How often a brand is named or cited in answers from AI assistants for the prompts its buyers actually use. The emerging equivalent of rank tracking, measured by prompting at scale and counting mentions.

Alt text

Alt text is the written description in an image's alt attribute. Screen readers read it aloud for people who cannot see the image, browsers show it when the image fails to load, and search engines use it to understand what the image shows.

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