Technical SEO
Technical SEO is the work that lets search engines and AI crawlers reach and understand a site. It covers crawlability, indexation, site speed, mobile rendering, canonicals, redirects, sitemaps, structured data and URL structure. It rarely wins rankings on its own, but it reliably stops a site from ranking when it is wrong.
Written and maintained by the SEO Engico team
Two mechanical engineers turned marketers, and the people who do the work. Meet the team
Last reviewed 4 August 2026
What breaks most often?
Redirects after a migration, by a distance. A site move that leaves old URLs returning 404 with no mapping loses whatever those URLs had earned, and the damage is usually invisible in the analytics that most teams watch. Indexation problems come second, then canonical tags pointing somewhere unintended, then pagination and faceted navigation generating more URLs than a crawler will ever work through.
Does site speed still matter for ranking?
It matters, but less than the amount of attention it receives. Core Web Vitals are a genuine signal and a genuinely bad experience will cost conversions regardless of ranking. What is not true is that shaving a further 200 milliseconds off an already-decent page will move a competitive term. Fix speed because slow pages lose customers, not because you expect a ranking jump.
Worth knowing if you are measuring: field data in the Chrome User Experience Report is a 28-day rolling window, so an improvement takes weeks to show fully. Use first-party monitoring if you need a faster read.
How does technical SEO affect AI search?
Directly, through crawler access. AI crawlers are separate user agents from Googlebot, and a robots.txt written before they existed may be blocking GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot or Google-Extended without anyone deciding to. A page that cannot be fetched cannot be cited, whatever else is right about it.