You’ve put $10,000 into a website for your new business, but it’s not attracting the traffic or attention you expected.
You spent six months redesigning your company website, and suddenly there is a large drop in traffic and rankings.
Both situations likely share a common root cause: technical SEO issues.
Before your website can appear in search results or AI tools, it must be crawlable. This means some robot has to visit your website, collect your content, and process it. If you prohibit these robots from visiting your site, they’ll respect that restriction.
Being visible in search results and AI tools is crucial for business success. This visibility brings traffic that you can convert into leads and sales. But to achieve this, your website needs to meet certain standards.
In this article, I will explain the differences between search engine crawlers and AI crawlers, how they work, why they might overlook your site, and provide actionable solutions to improve your visibility.
How Google and AI Crawlers Work
How Googlebot Finds Your Business
Googlebot is the most famous search engine crawler, and I’ll use it as my primary example. However, each search engine has its own crawler, such as Bingbot for Bing.
These crawlers continuously browse almost the entire internet, looking for new content and changes to existing content. Because of the internet’s vast size, it can take weeks or even months until Googlebot finds your website without intervention.
If you want to help Googlebot find your website earlier and faster, you should submit your XML sitemap in Google Search Console. This gives search engines a roadmap to your content.
Once they have this roadmap, or they just found your website through other means, crawlers browse websites link by link, following available paths. When they discover a specific page, they immediately begin to process it.
Essentially, Googlebot takes a snapshot of the visited page and then looks for text, images, links, or any other allowed content. It stores this information for weeks, months, or even years, depending on how frequently you update the content. This is why simply changing 2024 to 2025 in articles doesn’t work anymore.
Once a page is crawled, Google processes the content through algorithms. If it’s good enough, the page will be indexed, meaning it can appear in search results. After that comes the third stage: ranking. Based on complex algorithms, Google decides what position your page deserves.
After this process, we return to the first stage, where Googlebot periodically checks your page and, based on changes, decides whether to keep you indexed and update your ranking.
What Makes AI Tools Different from Traditional Search
When discussing AI, we should separate them into two main categories: models and tools based on those models. Let me start with Large Language Models (LLMs), which many of you know as GPT, Gemini, or Claude.
LLMs need training on massive amounts of data that the average person can barely imagine. Most companies typically crawl the internet, using content from millions of websites for training and improving their models. This process takes enormous time. That’s why, if you don’t use the search functionality in your favorite AI tools, you can’t ask about certain things because some events happened after the model was trained.
For example, the GPT-4o model was trained on data available on the internet before October 2023, so it only knows about things that happened before that month.
The main difference is that Google uses a snapshot of your page, while LLMs like GPT use a snapshot of the entire internet. This is why they cannot always be up to date when you need them.
Getting your content directly into any model is a lengthy process, typically taking months or years. You simply have to wait until the model is retrained or until a completely new model is released.
Another important point is that AI tool crawlers typically don’t render JavaScript. So if your website uses only client-side rendering, your content probably won’t ever appear in any model.
How AI Search Functions
AI Search, most notably ChatGPT Search, is a hybrid between traditional search engines like Google and large language models such as GPT-4o.
Google has its own search engine, so when you use Gemini and search for real-time results, it uses the same website index as traditional search. AI Overviews operate quite differently, and there is no clear pattern behind them yet. We can see many low-authority, scam websites and even non-existent websites being used. Once this becomes more stable, it will be worth exploring how it works in detail.
ChatGPT, probably the most popular AI tool for most people with search functionality, is powered by Bing’s index, thanks to the close partnership between OpenAI and Microsoft (owner of Bing).
Search functionality in these two most popular tools works like this: when you search for something, it takes the search engine’s index, retrieves results, scrapes content of pages from results, and then processes the content with LLM to create an answer to your question.
So if your website doesn’t appear in the top positions of Google or Bing results, you’re unlikely to appear in the search functionality of Gemini and ChatGPT.
Common Technical Reasons Why Your Business Might Be Invisible
Unintentional Blocking Issues
I frequently encounter websites that block indexing in their robots.txt file. This issue is especially common for sites that have been recently migrated. However, many businesses take 2-3 months to identify the problem and understand why their revenue is decreasing.
Another common mistake is adding noindex tags to an entire website. This frequently happens with WordPress sites where there’s a specific checkbox labeled “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” in the Reading settings.
Moving to more advanced issues, being overlooked can also result from incorrectly configured canonical tags, which can function like noindex when set up improperly. Canonical tags help prevent duplicate content by designating one authoritative URL when you have multiple nearly identical pages. We use this technique to avoid duplication, which is a frequent reason sites get overlooked.
Site Architecture Problems
Poor site architecture can be one reason why Google might ignore your site, but let’s focus only on internal linking as the main part of flawed architecture. There are basically two problems:
- Orphan pages, which are very difficult for crawlers to find. I personally follow a simple rule: every single page on the website must be accessible within 3 clicks. It’s crucial to cross-link pages and articles using meaningful keywords, which also helps build better authority for specific pages.
- Broken links, where crawlers can’t continue anywhere, and you’re wasting the valuable time they allocated to check your website.
Another major issue is client-side JavaScript rendering. Search engine crawlers like Googlebot typically don’t have many problems with this if the site performs very well. However, if the website is slow, it can create numerous crawling and indexing issues, causing your website to be overlooked.
It’s important to note that most AI crawlers don’t render JavaScript at all. This means your website will be completely overlooked. The solution is straightforward in this case: switch to server-side rendering.
Performance and Security Factors
Performance issues primarily affect large websites. For small and medium websites, performance isn’t such a critical issue, at least regarding crawl budget.
However, performance and Core Web Vitals are important and do have an impact. As Google prioritizes user experience, these metrics are becoming more significant. The main reason you should care about performance is primarily your users, as there’s a clear connection between poor conversions and bad Core Web Vitals and speed.
It’s also worth mentioning basic requirements such as having HTTPS and ensuring overall website security. Once your website gets hacked, it can take months to recover. So don’t underestimate the importance of keeping your WordPress plugins up to date.
Google Search Console can help identify performance and security issues with its dedicated sections. For deeper investigation, it’s better to contact a technical SEO professional.
Content and Authority Factors
Content Quality Challenges
Thin or duplicate content are pretty frequent reasons why your website is not indexed and shown to users. Google and even other search engines prefer meaningful content which can help users. Why should Google simply show your website for a specific keyword if there is no answer or the answer is not sufficient?
Credibility Metrics
With a new website, everybody faces some problems, especially authority issues. By default, the authority of the website is low or neutral. To get better authority, every website needs high-quality backlinks.
How can you get them? One way is to buy them, which can be very expensive, as valuable backlinks typically cost over $1,000 for each link.
A better but slower way is to build good E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness). With this approach, some websites will likely give you backlinks for free because you bring something valuable worth mentioning on other sites.
Brand Building Beyond Your Website
AI has limited knowledge capabilities. There’s simply no way to know everything. The more frequently your brand is mentioned on the internet, across social media, websites, and other platforms, the more likely your brand will appear in AI models’ knowledge base.
Being active on social media is not only a great source of additional traffic but it also helps boost your authority as a brand or business. For example, we can clearly see that having videos on YouTube helps increase brand awareness over time. Personally, I would say it’s even a must for the majority of businesses.
Actionable Steps to Improve Visibility
Now we know why you might be overlooked by Google and other search engines and AI tools. But what can you do? Some issues can be resolved with developers, but for others, it’s good to hire a consultant who will run an audit and find everything worth fixing to increase your chances of appearing in search results.
However, some things, especially content and your authority, rest solely in your hands, and you simply have to invest lots of time into building them.
Technical SEO Fundamentals
At the beginning when your website is completely overlooked, I recommend checking robots.txt to ensure there’s no disallowing of the entire site. The second thing is definitely checking for noindex tags. You can identify these manually by examining the code or through Google Search Console.
It’s also crucial to understand that Google and many other crawlers are basically smartphones. This means if something isn’t visible in your mobile version, it essentially doesn’t exist.
Don’t forget to have an XML sitemap and submit it in Google Search Console. This helps Googlebot find all pages on your website, especially if you have poor internal linking with many orphaned pages.
We should also keep in mind proper JavaScript usage. All content on the website should appear even when JavaScript is disabled. You can quickly check this in your browser by turning off JavaScript completely. AI crawlers in particular will completely ignore you if you depend too much on JavaScript.
Last but not least is performance, which can trigger issues with crawl budget but especially affects Google rankings. Core Web Vitals are heavily used and have a significant influence on user experience. Simply put, when your visitors don’t like your performance because they have to wait too long or random elements appear on the page, Google is less likely to recommend that page.
Content Enhancement Strategies
One of the most overlooked strategies for appearing in good positions on Google and in tools like ChatGPT Search is creating unique and valuable content. Your content must always provide value, otherwise there’s no reason for search engines to show it to users.
Once your website appears in search results, it’s worth having properly implemented structured data. This can significantly improve your click-through rate as your website will be more visible among other results.
It’s also important to maintain content regularly. However, this means more than just changing the year from 2024 to 2025. Update the article to keep the knowledge and value relevant for the current year.
Lastly, it’s important to have strong internal linking, which shows Google which keywords are valuable for you. If a keyword is worth linking internally on your website, it’s probably worth it for search engines too.
Authority Building Tactics
A strategy you should focus on all the time is building quality backlinks. Please forget about buying large amounts of backlinks with zero value. One high-quality backlink will always be worth more than millions of very low-quality ones.
Bringing interesting statistics, research, or building handy micro tools will likely attract other websites to link to you even for free.
Don’t forget to enhance E-E-A-T signals. Don’t publish faceless content. Always show your face, name, and include a bio about you as the author. People will more likely trust a website that doesn’t hide its authors from the public.
Also focus on building your brand. It’s the most important strategy for the future. The more people specifically look for your brand, the less dependent you are on getting traffic from Google. And we know how volatile traffic can be. You can be there one day and gone the next, even when you’ve done everything correctly.
Conclusion
In this digital landscape, being visible to both search engines and AI tools is no longer optional but essential for business success. I’ve shared the key differences between how Google and AI tools crawl and process your content, highlighting why many businesses struggle with online visibility despite significant investments.
Remember that technical issues like robots.txt restrictions, noindex tags, and poor site architecture are often the culprits behind invisibility. Additionally, content quality, website authority, and brand presence play crucial roles in how discoverable your business becomes.
By implementing the actionable steps outlined in this article, from fixing technical SEO fundamentals to enhancing your content strategy and building genuine authority, you can significantly improve your chances of being found online. The digital world rewards those who understand its mechanics and adapt accordingly.
The best approach is always to consult with a professional who has helped many businesses before and knows what to look for. Consultants’ time can be expensive, but losing revenue or wasting time guessing what the problem might cost even more in the long run.
If you need help with technical SEO or web performance, I’m here ready to assist you in making your business visible online.