Technical SEO
Technical SEO is the work on a website's code and setup that lets search engines find, read and store its pages. Google's Search Essentials set the minimum: Googlebot isn't blocked, the page loads without an error, and the content is in a format Google can index and doesn't break its spam policies. Google adds that meeting them doesn't guarantee indexing.
Source: Google Search Central, Google Search technical requirements, checked October 29, 2026
What Technical SEO means for your business
It's the part of SEO a buyer never sees. It covers crawling and indexing, redirects when pages move, duplicate pages, page speed, sitemaps, structured data and how the site works on a phone. It sits beside on-page work, the words on each page, and off-page work, the links and mentions from other sites. We still do all three.
The same basics decide whether a page can show up as a link in Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, since Google requires those pages to be indexed first. AI companies add their own crawlers on top, so we'd also check that your robots.txt file and firewall let in the search crawlers you want to be found by.
We'd start with the Page indexing report in Google Search Console, then fix whatever keeps your service pages out, before we move on to speed and the rest. If your pages exist but don't show up in Google or in AI answers, a technical check of what search engines can reach is the first thing we'd do.
Last reviewed October 29, 2026. All terms
How AI answers it today
On October 29, 2026, Google's AI Overview defined it as work on a site's code and servers so search engines and AI systems can crawl, index and cite pages, citing Semrush, Ahrefs, agency blogs and a university page. ChatGPT gave a similar checklist and cited nothing.
Our run through ChatGPT and Google's AI Overview, October 29, 2026. A sample, not what every buyer sees.
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