Technical SEO
The infrastructure layer of SEO, crawlability, site speed, indexability, structured data, that determines whether search engines and AI crawlers can access a site at all.
What it means
Technical SEO covers everything that happens before content quality matters: can a crawler reach the page, render it, and parse it correctly. Broken robots.txt rules, slow server response times, JavaScript-heavy pages that don't render cleanly, and missing structured data all fall under technical SEO. For AI visibility specifically, technical SEO has expanded to include AI-crawler-specific concerns, GPTBot and PerplexityBot access, llms.txt configuration, that traditional technical SEO audits didn't historically check.
Why it matters for Shopify
Shopify merchants with technical SEO issues, blocked AI crawlers, slow-rendering pages, missing schema, lose AI visibility for reasons that have nothing to do with content quality.