Webinar Recap: Tech SEO Checklist with Jairo Guerrero

In this AirOps webinar, Jairo Guerrero joined Josh Spilker to explain why pages rank in Google yet miss AI citations—and what teams should check first.

The core message: if machines cannot crawl, render, and understand your site, they cannot surface it in AI answers either.

Top Takeaways

Google rankings and AI citations run on different decision trees. Google returns sources for users to scan themselves. LLMs fan a prompt into sub-queries, run vector search across topics and entities instead of exact URLs, pull a long list, then rerank down to a short one. Jairo tested this directly. He found LLMs sometimes exclude a page's known top Google ranking outright when it conflicts with the model's read of user intent.

​Most AI bots never crawl your site. They hit search APIs instead. Crawling costs money, and Google does that work the best. AI platforms typically pull a snippet from Google or Bing's API first. They only send a bot to your server when that snippet can't answer the query. This breaks the usual link between crawl volume and citations.

​Speed and uptime buy citation odds. A study of 2,000+ sites found faster pages earned 20 to 30% more citations.

​Server logs catch what standard tools miss. Google Search Console shows crawled versus not crawled, with no LLM breakdown. Server logs expose zero-visit pages, orphan pages, broken links, and JavaScript rendering gaps.

​Agent readiness is next, and it's unforgiving. Jairo changed an "Add to cart" button from a <button> tag to a <span> tag. Humans saw no difference. But an AI agent could no longer register it as clickable. With Google, Shopify, PayPal, and Stripe already building agent commerce protocols, semantic HTML now decides whether an agent will be able to transact on your site.

Best Practices and Key Learnings

AI visibility starts with technical access, not clever copy changes. Here are the most useful lessons and next steps for SEO and content teams.

Think ofRankings and Citations as Two Different Goals

Google search and AI search solve different user jobs, so they don't choose sources the same way. If you only track rankings, you'll miss how AI tools retrieve by topic, intent, and entity relationships.

• Build content around clear topics and entities, not only target URLs and exact-match keywords.
• Check whether your highest-value pages answer the broader intent behind prompts, not just traditional search queries.
• Track citations and mentions separately from rank positions so you can spot gaps earlier.

"So that's why Google rankings and AI citations are not the same, because they cover a completely different mental framework for the user." — Jairo Guerrero

Fix Crawlability and Rendering Before You Optimize Content

Jairo kept coming back to the same principle: content cannot win if bots cannot access it. Search engines still act as the main discovery layer for AI tools, so indexation comes first.

• Audit indexation, internal links, and robots rules before you spend time rewriting pages.
• Reduce JavaScript dependency where you can, and push key content into server-rendered HTML.
• Improve page speed and uptime so crawlers can load critical content before they leave.

"There is no content strategy that is successful without a good technical setup." — Jairo Guerrero

Make Pages Lighter, Faster, and Easier for Machines to Fetch

AI crawlers don't always behave like Googlebot, and they may give up sooner on slow or heavy pages. Clean delivery improves your odds because it helps both search engines and AI systems retrieve the right content quickly.

• Watch Core Web Vitals, especially on templates that power large page sets like product, category, and location pages.
• Trim bloated HTML and unnecessary scripts so the page returns useful content fast.
• Protect server response times with solid infrastructure and bot protection, since downtime kills both crawl activity and citations.

Use Server Logs to Find Invisible Pages and Missed Bot Activity

Standard SEO tools show part of the story, but server logs show what actually hit your site. They help you catch missing bot signals, rendering gaps, orphan pages, and blocked crawlers before those issues turn into traffic loss.

• Check whether your most important pages receive visits from search crawlers and AI bots at all.
• Compare HTML requests and JavaScript asset requests to spot pages that fail during rendering.
• If you run on a closed platform, note any limits on log access, since that makes diagnosis harder.

Check Simple Technical Blocks Before You Chase Edge Cases

Some of the biggest AI visibility losses come from basic setup mistakes, not advanced optimization work. A wrong robots directive, a dead page, or a missing internal link can wipe out your opportunity before AI systems even consider your content.

• Review robots.txt and confirm you don't block major AI crawlers by mistake.
• Fix broken landings, redirect useful retired pages, and clean up orphaned URLs that waste crawl attention.
• Start with the fundamentals before you test experimental tactics.

Start Preparing for Agent-Ready Websites Now

AI search won't stop at answering questions. Jairo argued that sites also need to support agent actions like adding to cart, booking, and paying, which raises the bar for semantic markup and machine-readable interfaces.

• Use real buttons, form controls, and semantic HTML so agents can understand what actions a page supports.
• Test important conversion flows with accessibility tooling to see what a machine can actually interpret.
• Watch emerging commerce and payment protocols from platforms like Google, Shopify, PayPal, and Stripe.

"We need to kind of go towards that upgrades and making sure that our website is not just machine readable, easy to crawl and easy to understand for actual agents, not only search engines." — Jairo Guerrero

^How to Put This Technical SEO Checklist Into Practice

AI search changes the retrieval layer, but it still depends on technical access to your content. Start by asking the hard questions: Can search engines index the page? Can bots render it fast? Can machines understand the important parts without extra effort?

Run a focused audit on your highest-value page groups. Check indexation, robots rules, server logs, Core Web Vitals, internal links, and semantic elements on conversion pages, then fix the blockers in that order. Don't expect LLMs to discover pages that search engines ignore, and don't assume strong rankings alone will earn citations.

Technical SEO Now Drives AI Search Visibility

The webinar made a practical case for a new kind of SEO checklist. Teams that want more AI visibility need to think beyond rankings and make their sites easier for search engines, AI crawlers, and future agents to retrieve and act on.

Want to turn these ideas into a repeatable workflow? Book a call to see how AirOps helps teams monitor AI visibility, improve content coverage, and find technical gaps faster.

How AirOps Helps Teams Get Found in AI Search

AirOps helps content and SEO teams connect technical visibility work with scalable content execution. You can use AirOps to monitor citations, spot content gaps, refresh key pages, and turn AI search insights into a clear plan your team can ship.

If you want a tighter process for AI search visibility, book a call.