AEO Strategy: Technical Experience
Welcome to our final pillar: Experience. This is the technical side of AEO. Your amazing content and authority won't matter if the AI crawlers can't easily access, understand, and extract your information.
Good news! Many of the best practices for traditional SEO still apply, but with a renewed, critical importance.
AEO in Action: Validating Your Technical Experience
How do you know if your technical AEO efforts are working? How can you be sure AI bots can even see your content in the first place?
This is where log file analysis becomes your key diagnostic tool. You must validate that AI crawlers are successfully visiting your site.
How to Track in Conductor
- Tool: AI Crawler Activity in Conductor Monitoring (part of the Log File Analysis feature).
- What It Is: This feature analyzes your server's log files to show you exactly which AI-specific crawlers (like ChatGPT-User, GPTBot, PerplexityBot, etc.) are visiting your site, which pages they're crawling, and how often.
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Why It's Your Key Diagnostic: This is the early warning system we talked about in Lesson 2. It helps you answer a critical question:
- "Is my technical setup the problem?" If you see no AI bot activity, you know you have a foundational problem, like an incorrect robots.txt rule or a log file filter that's blocking the bots.
- "Is my content the problem?" If you see high crawl activity (bots are visiting) but you still have low AI Visibility (you're not getting mentions/citations), it's a strong signal that your technical setup is fine, and you need to focus on improving your Authority and Content (Pillars 1 & 2).
- Important Note: This feature is available to enterprise package customers.
Deeper Dives: Key Technical Challenges
Let's take a closer look at a few of the most critical and confusing technical points.
Deep Dive: Do LLMs render JavaScript?
This is a big one, especially for those of us who have worked hard to optimize JavaScript-heavy sites for Google.
The simple answer is: Not yet, at least not consistently.
While Googlebot has become incredibly sophisticated at rendering JavaScript (it essentially acts like a headless browser), many independent LLM crawlers (like those powering some chatbot web-browsing features) are more lightweight for now. They often fetch the source HTML and move on.
What does this mean for you?
If your crucial content relies entirely on client-side JavaScript to load, those LLMs might see a blank page or incomplete information. It's like inviting the AI to a dinner party but locking the food in the kitchen.
Our Strategic Advice: Don't Panic, Just Be Aware
This is most likely a temporary problem. The expert consensus is that AI crawlers for tools like ChatGPT are in a race to catch up with Google and Perplexity.
- We do not advise investing in a massive, expensive site re-architecture just to be seen by these crawlers today.
- We do advise that the best practice for universal accessibility is to use server-side rendering (SSR), static site generation (SSG), or hybrid approaches for your most critical content.
The takeaway? If you're already using or planning to use SSR, you're in a great position. If you have a script-heavy site, don't panic. Just be aware that for right now, some of your content might be invisible to parts of the AI ecosystem.
For more details on rendering capabilities by AI engine, see our LLM JavaScript Rendering Capability Matrix.
Deep Dive: What's an LLM.txt and do I need one?
You may have heard about LLM.txt, an emerging, proposed standard (similar to robots.txt) designed to give Large Language Models specific instructions on how to interact with your website.
In theory, it's a file you'd place in your site's root directory. Unlike robots.txt (which is for blocking crawlers), LLM.txt would be for guiding them.
But let's be very clear: this is a super early stage test.
As of now, none of the major LLMs—like Google or OpenAI—officially support or read this file.
So, do you need one?
The short answer is no, not right now. While some SEO tools are starting to support its creation, it's a proactive experiment, not a recognized standard. Think of it as a way to be ready if it ever becomes supported, but it will not impact your AEO performance with the major engines today.
A Final Note: The Messy Reality of Controlling Access
Everything we've discussed so far is about AEO—our main goal is to get AI to see, trust, and cite our content. We want these bots to visit.
But what about the content you don't want to be cited? For this, you have a tool you already know: robots.txt.
This is the global standard, supported by all cooperative crawlers (Google-Extended, ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot, etc.), for telling bots which parts of your site to stay out of. You can use it to block specific AI user agents from:
- Paid or members-only sections
- Internal search results
- Staging or test pages
The Critical Caveat (A Word of Warning)
Now, it's important to be realistic. robots.txt is not a magic shield, especially in the world of AI.
The AI world has a "data history" problem. Many models were trained on massive web scrapes that were collected before these new AI-specific robots.txt rules were put in place.
This means that even if you block an AI crawler today, your content might already be in its training data from a crawl last year. This is why you might see content you thought was blocked still appearing in AI answers.
The takeaway?
Your AEO strategy should be to let crawlers in. That's how you get mentions and citations.
You should only use robots.txt to block specific sections for clear business reasons. When you do, understand that it's a go-forward instruction for cooperative bots, not a retroactive "delete button" for data that is already in a trained model.
Lesson 4 Key Takeaways
- Technical AEO is about making your content easy for bots to crawl, understand, and extract.
- Prioritize clean HTML, fast page speed, and strong internal linking.
- Many AI crawlers do not render JavaScript reliably yet. SSR/SSG is the safest bet, but don't panic-invest in a total re-architecture.
- LLM.txt is an unsupported, "early-stage test" and is not currently read by major LLMs.
- Use robots.txt to block crawlers from specific areas, but understand it's a "go-forward" instruction and not a retroactive "delete button" for data already in a trained model.