Site Code Optimization

Your site's technical foundation affects how reliably AI crawlers can access, parse, and cite your content. These code-level fixes have the highest impact on AEO performance after content quality.

Required meta tags — every article page

<title>Article Title - Brand Name</title>
<meta name="description" content="Your meta description here.">

Canonical tags

Every page must have a self-referencing canonical tag pointing to its exact URL. Without canonical tags, content accessible at multiple URLs (www/non-www, http/https, trailing slash variants) creates duplicate indexing that dilutes citation signals.

Page speed for AI crawlers

AI crawlers have timeout limits. Pages that load slowly may be partially crawled or skipped:

• •Serve images in WebP format — 25–35% smaller than JPEG/PNG
• •Enable Gzip or Brotli compression on your server
• •Minify CSS and JavaScript
• •Use a CDN for static assets
• •Server response under 200ms (Time to First Byte)

Heading hierarchy

• •One H1 per page — the article title only
• •H2 for main sections
• •H3 for subsections within H2 sections
• •Never skip heading levels — no H4 without an H3 above it

JavaScript rendering

AI crawlers do not reliably execute JavaScript. If your article content is rendered by JavaScript — common in React and Vue apps — crawlers may see an empty page. Fix: implement server-side rendering (SSR) or static site generation (SSG) for all content pages. Next.js, Nuxt, and Astro support this natively.