Technical SEO rests on the same building blocks whether the reader is a Google crawler or an AI model. As we covered in the Plain-English guide, those pillars are crawlability and indexability, site speed and Core Web Vitals, and structured data. What's changed is the audience. Search engines used to be the only automated reader of your website. Now AI crawlers and retrieval systems are reading it too, and they're far less forgiving of a messy technical foundation.