Technical AEO: if AI engines can't reach your site, nothing else matters.

Technical AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) focuses specifically on making your site accessible and trustworthy to AI-powered answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews. Technical SEO covers the same ground for traditional search engines. Many fundamentals overlap: crawlability, HTTPS, page speed, and canonical tags matter for both. The difference is that AI engines are stricter about access signals. A site that's borderline crawlable for Google may be completely invisible to AI crawlers, particularly if robots.txt blocks specific user agents like GPTBot or ClaudeBot.

Yes, significantly. If you block AI crawler user agents in your robots.txt, those engines can't crawl your content and therefore can't cite it in their responses. Your AEO score reflects this directly. Some sites block AI crawlers without realising it, either through wildcard disallow rules or by copying robots.txt configurations from templates. Caijo's scanner checks specifically for AI crawler blocking and flags it as a high-priority issue.

Page speed affects AEO in two ways. First, crawl efficiency: AI crawlers have limited time budgets per domain, and slow pages mean fewer pages get crawled per session. Second, trust signals: consistently slow load times suggest a poorly maintained site, which can reduce confidence in the content quality. For AEO purposes, getting pages under 3 seconds is a reasonable target. Core Web Vitals scores also feed into the overall trust picture that AI engines build around your domain.

The three most damaging crawl errors for AEO are: broken internal links pointing to 404 pages (signals poor site maintenance), blocking rules in robots.txt that prevent AI crawlers from accessing key content, and redirect chains longer than two hops (wastes crawl budget and can cause crawlers to abandon the chain entirely). Server errors (5xx responses) are also serious because they suggest instability. Caijo's scan surfaces all of these with a clear explanation of the AEO impact of each one.