Technical SEO: the mistakes that kill your visibility on Google and LLMs

You can publish great content all you want, but it won’t matter if Google struggles to crawl your site. At a time when AI and LLMs are disrupting search, technical SEO is no longer optional. It’s the essential foundation for appearing in search results and, increasingly, in AI-generated answers. Learn how to optimize your architecture and crawl budget to stay visible and competitive.

Technical SEO: your invisible growth lever

There’s a lot of talk about keywords, content strategies, and optimized snippets. Yet a hard truth remains: without solid technical SEO, your content will reach no one.

Your site may host high-quality articles or especially attractive product pages, but if its structure resembles a pile of completely disorganized pages, your traffic will remain stagnant. Simply put: poor technical SEO wastes crawl budget on useless pages, leaving you invisible.

Technical SEO is not a simple checklist or a task to hand off to the development team. It’s a strategic lever for growth and visibility, especially now that AI is redefining how online content is discovered.

Crawl efficiency: the foundation of your SEO

Before diving into the heart of the matter, let’s remember this: the effectiveness of your crawling determines what gets indexed, updated, and ranked.

The older your site, the more it may have accumulated issues: obsolete pages, redirect chains, orphaned content, overloaded JavaScript, pagination or parameter problems… Each of these contributes to slowing down Googlebot.

Improving crawl efficiency doesn’t mean increasing the number of pages crawled. It means preventing Google from wasting time on useless pages so that it focuses on the pages that truly matter for your online presence.

Organize without flattening: the myth of the flat structure

You sometimes hear that Google prefers “flat” sites. In reality, Google prefers accessible sites, not necessarily “flat.” A deep architecture, if well organized, does not harm your ranking — quite the opposite.

Indeed, if well maintained, this architecture:

• Makes crawling easier,
• Simplifies redirects,
• Helps manage robots.txt rules,
• Makes maintenance and analysis simpler.

The real problem is when a key page is five clicks from the homepage. It's not URL depth that matters, but its ease of internal access.

Recommendations:

• Use content hubs and targeted internal linking.
• Create HTML sitemaps to highlight your strategic pages.
• Avoid placing everything at the site root in the name of a supposedly 'flat' SEO.

Example:

• /products/waterproof-jackets/mens/blue-mountain-parkas is a structured, readable URL that helps ranking and analysis.
• Conversely, placing all your content in the root directory makes fine-grained analysis in GA4 impossible.

For blogs, prefer category- or topic-based URLs (e.g. /blog/technical-seo/structured-data-guide) rather than dated ones. Dated URLs give the impression of outdated content, even when it's been updated.

Eliminate crawl waste

Every site has a crawl budget assigned by Google. The larger your site, the more likely you are to squander it on useless pages:

• Calendar pages resulting from faceted navigation,
• Internal search results,
• Test environments left open,
• Infinite scroll generating low-value URLs,
• Countless duplicates related to UTM parameters.

Recommendations:

• Audit your crawl logs.
• Block unnecessary pages in robots.txt.
• Use canonical tags correctly.
• Clean up massive tag archives that are never visited.

Clean up your redirect chains

Redirects are often added hastily during migrations or URL changes. As a result, unnecessary redirect chains resulting in:

• Slow down the site,
• Waste the crawl budget,
• Fragment your authority.

Recommendations:

• Create a redirect map every quarter.
• Reduce your chains to a single direct redirect.
• Update your internal links to point to the final destination, without going through intermediate URLs.

Pro tip A clean URL structure is essential to prevent redirects from becoming a nightmare. Flat sites make redirect management harder, not the other way around.

Don't hide your links in JavaScript

Google can now interpret JavaScript, but not always consistently. On their side, LLMs still can't interact with dynamic menus.

If your important links are injected via JS or hidden behind modals, they may be:

• Invisible to crawlers,
• Inaccessible to generative AI,
• And therefore absent from generated responses.

Recommendations:

• Provide content using static HTML whenever possible.
• Create a navigable version of your help center or documentation.
• Use real HTML links instead of JS triggers.

Without that, your content risks being upstaged by Reddit or old articles in the AI's suggestions.

Manage pagination and parameters with care

Infinite scroll, poor pagination handling and uncontrolled URL parameters can create:

• Overloaded crawl paths,
• A risk of authority dilution,
• Indexing issues.

Recommendations:

• Prefer path-based pagination formats (e.g. /blog/page/2/) rather than parameter-based (?page=2).
• Ensure each paginated page contains unique or additional content.
• Avoid canonicalizing all your paginated pages to page 1, as this risks ignoring the rest.
• Block or set to noindex unnecessary filter combinations.
• Only use Google Search Console to define parameter handling if you have a clear strategy. Otherwise, you risk shooting yourself in the foot.

Pro tip : don't rely on client-side JavaScript to build your paginated lists. Infinite scroll that is invisible to robots is also invisible to LLMs.

Crawl and AI: why it's more crucial than ever

With the rise of AI Overviews and generated answers, you might think crawl optimization matters less. On the contrary, it is more important than ever.

Indeed:

• AI relies on indexed and reliable content.
• No crawl, no indexing.
• No indexing, no citation in AI responses.

AI search agents (Google, Perplexity, ChatGPT in browsing mode) do not fetch entire pages. They extract blocks of information: paragraphs, lists, snippets of text. To be picked up, your content must:

• To be crawled,
• To be indexed,
• And to be structured for extraction.

In short: you will never appear in an AI Overview if Google cannot crawl and understand your pages.

The crawl: a thermometer of your site's health

Beyond indexing, a clean crawl is an excellent indicator of technical health.

If your logs show thousands of obsolete pages or a bot spending 80% of its time crawling useless pages… it's a sign your site is poorly organized.

Focusing your attention on it improves:

• Performance,
• User experience,
• The accuracy of your analyses.

Your immediate priorities

If you lack time or resources, focus on these priority actions:

1. Crawl budget analysis : identify where Googlebot wastes its time.
2. Internal link optimization : your important pages must be easily accessible.
3. Eliminating crawl traps : put an end to dead URLs, duplicates, or infinite scrolls.
4. Check JavaScript rendering : ensure your critical content is visible to Google.
5. Reducing redirect chains : especially on your strategic or high-traffic pages.

Keywords are useless if your site isn't crawlable. Start by fixing your technical infrastructure before thinking about content or E-E-A-T. It's the key to existing in an AI-driven web.

The article “Technical SEO: the mistakes that kill your visibility on Google and LLMs” was published on the site Abondance.