Technical SEO for AI Search: What to Keep, Start and Stop Doing
Technical SEO
Step-by-step
Technical SEO for AI search
Trigger Marketing
The Trigger team
⊹
Every few months someone announces that SEO is dead. Then everyone updates their robots.txt. Funny how that works.
Let's skip the funeral and figure out what to actually do.
This post sorts the advice from four recent videos into three piles: keep, start, stop. Think of it as Marie Kondo for your technical SEO. Where the experts disagree, we say so and name them.
Quick words (one line each):
Technical SEO: the behind-the-scenes setup that lets bots find, read and understand your pages.
Schema: extra code that labels facts on a page (like "this is a business, this is its address").
llms.txt: a text file some people add to a site to guide AI tools.
KEEP (it's working, don't touch it)
1. Your normal SEO foundation
Victorious says Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode use the normal Google index. Pages that Google can't index don't show up there either.
2. Open doors for search bots
Allow Googlebot, Bingbot and OAI-SearchBot. Block training bots narrowly if you want to block them at all (Victorious).
3. Your schema, with one condition
Victorious says keep it, and put the same facts in visible text on the page. His schema test data is from small vendor tests, and he calls it "not established proof." Kasra Dash says AI search does not use schema, and he rates it C/D tier in his own tier list from his own testing. These two disagree. Keeping schema costs you little, and visible text covers you either way.
START (do these next)
4. Make every page stand alone
Put your company name and a short description near the top of each page (Victorious). A bot that lands on one page gets the full story.
5. Put key facts in visible text
Most AI crawlers do not run JavaScript, per Victorious. If your facts load with JavaScript, many bots never see them.
6. Check your CDN and logs
robots.txt is a request. Victorious cites a vendor test where about 4 in 10 sites that banned GPTBot still served it pages, and he says Cloudflare's free-plan defaults can block training and agent crawlers on ad-showing pages. Check your logs. Our step-by-step bot access check covers it.
7. Check Bing and Brave
For Copilot, Victorious says keep Bing Webmaster Tools set up with your sitemap submitted. For Claude, he says test your key buyer questions in Brave Search, because Anthropic lists Brave as a search vendor. If you don't show in Brave, Claude can miss you.
8. Build a "single source of truth" page and a case studies page
Kasra Dash says to have one page that states who you are, what you do and who you serve. He says it is not a direct ranking factor but speeds up everything else. He adds case studies, reviews and testimonials pages, and rates all of these S or A tier.
9. Earn mentions on other sites
Gotch says reviews come first, then the 3 to 5 review and directory sites that keep appearing in your category. See our mentions gap list post.
STOP (put it down and step away)
10. Skip llms.txt by default (the easiest to-do on this list)
Victorious says skip it, and he points to John Mueller of Google comparing it to the old keywords meta tag. Kasra Dash puts llms.txt in his low C/D tiers. Neither recommends it, and the other two videos don't mention it. Some SEO tools generate it anyway, so don't take a tool's word on this.
11. Stop trusting Google-Extended to hide you from AI Overviews
Victorious says it has no effect on AI Overviews. And old nosnippet and max-snippet tags limit Google's AI features, so remove them if you want to be shown.
12. Stop building piles of local citations
Gotch says stop mass-building citations. Pick the 3 to 5 sites that matter and work them properly.
13. Stop publishing mass AI-written pages with nothing new in them
Kasra Dash calls mass AI content a "big no-no," and says 50 listicles alone gave him a short bump, then a drop. Neil Patel says use AI for research, outlines and first drafts, and let a human write the final version.
Where the experts split
AI-written vs human-written content. Neil Patel says a human should write the final version. He says AI models cite human-written content more, and readers stayed longer on human-written pages (2:31) than on AI-written (1:54) or lightly edited AI pages (1:59). He gives no link to his data. Gotch ran a test and found "no obvious clear differences" between AI and human content. We don't have a winner. Our safe choice: a human writes the final copy.
Schema. See item 3.
Backlinks. Gotch says backlinks alone no longer win AI results. In his data, 72.8% of AI-cited pages had no page-level referring domains. Kasra Dash puts backlinks in his C/D tiers.
Awards. Neil Patel found them last. Kasra Dash rates them A.
ChatGPT's own index. Victorious says ChatGPT is no longer safely "just Bing" and seems to use a mix of its own index and outside sources. He says OpenAI has not confirmed this.
Heads-up
The channels behind these videos sell SEO tools, courses or services, and much of the data is their own. Treat each number as that speaker's claim.
Do this today
Check that your top 10 pages show your company name and a description at the top, with JavaScript off.
Search your page source for nosnippet and max-snippet.
Leave llms.txt alone.
Pick 3 review sites in your category and look at your profile on each.
Related reading
Sources
Kasra Dash ? I Ranked 32 AI Search Factors S to F (2026-10-20)
Candour Agency with Nathan Gotch ? AI search with Nathan Gotch... (2026-10-19)
Don't worry if this seems like it's a pain in the ass for someone who doesn't build websites. That's because it is. The good news: just click the link below, pull the trigger, and we'll take care of the rest.
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