What is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO is the practice of improving the technical foundations that allow search engines to crawl, render, and index a website reliably. Technical SEO includes site architecture, performance, indexing controls, and canonicalization.

Quick definition

Technical SEO means fixing technical issues so search engines can access and index a site correctly.

How Technical SEO works

• Technical SEO improves crawlability by making important pages reachable and not blocked.
• Technical SEO improves indexability by ensuring pages return correct status codes and are not duplicated.
• Technical SEO uses canonical URLs to consolidate duplicates.
• Technical SEO ensures the server returns content that crawlers can read, including for AI crawlers.

Why Technical SEO matters

Technical SEO matters because content cannot rank if the content is not crawled or indexed.

Technical SEO also affects AI visibility because many AI systems depend on accessible HTML content.

Example use cases

• Fixing broken internal links so crawlers can reach important pages.
• Resolving duplicate pages using canonical URL rules.
• Ensuring pages are indexable and not blocked by misconfigured directives.

Related terms

• Crawlability
• Indexability
• Canonical URL
• Structured Data
• AI Crawlers
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)