Make Pages Crawlable and Fast

Also known as: Core Web Vitals for AI, Site Speed Optimization, Crawl Budget Efficiency

Keep pages fast and remove crawl barriers like paywalls, login walls, or bot-blocking settings, since crawlers can only use content they can reach.

What is Make Pages Crawlable and Fast?

Impact Mechanism:
RAG & Retrieval
Category:
Technical & Schema
Effort:
Medium
Skill needed:
Technical & Dev
Evidence level:
Proven

How does it work?

  1. 1. Allow crawlers in robots.txt and CDN

    Check that robots.txt and your CDN or firewall bot settings, such as Cloudflare's AI crawler controls, don't block the search bots you want.

  2. 2. Serve main content in initial HTML

    Render main text, links and metadata on the server (SSR or static); major AI crawlers other than Google's and Apple's don't run JavaScript.

  3. 3. Keep public content outside login walls

    Crawlers can't log in; for intentional paywalls, mark gated sections with isAccessibleForFree false and a cssSelector so it isn't treated as cloaking.

  4. 4. Fix 404s and redirect chains

    Point internal links and sitemaps at final URLs; in Vercel's data about 35% of ChatGPT and Claude fetches hit 404 pages.

  5. 5. Meet Core Web Vitals targets

    Aim for LCP within 2.5 s, INP below 200 ms and CLS below 0.1, monitored in Search Console's Core Web Vitals report.

  6. 6. Test like a crawler

    Run Search Console's URL Inspection, and fetch the page with curl (no JavaScript) to confirm status 200 and the main text in the HTML.