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Technical SEO in the website build

Google’s page on AI Overviews and AI Mode says there is no extra technical requirement. To be eligible as a supporting link, the page has to be indexed and eligible for a snippet. The same bar as classic Search. A plugin named “SEO” does not clear it. A build that returns HTTP 200, with the words in the HTML, does.

Written by SiteMivo. Sources are Google Search Central, read 10 October 2026. This is not a ranking promise. Drafted with research assistance.

What has to be true before anyone talks about rank

  • Googlebot is not blocked, and the URL returns HTTP 200. Error pages are not indexed.
  • The words are in the HTML, not only in a canvas or a click handler.
  • Links are <a href>. Google generally cannot extract a URL from an onclick span.
  • Every page has its own title, in the same language as the page. Boilerplate titles get rewritten.
  • The mobile HTML matches the desktop HTML you expect to rank. Google indexes the smartphone version.
  • HTTPS. Google prefers the HTTPS URL as canonical when the certificate is valid.
  • If the sitemap has lastmod, it is the date of a real change to the main text, the structured data, or the links. A footer tweak is not a change. A lying lastmod gets ignored.
  • A self-referencing canonical, when you use one, matches the URL you actually serve, slash included.

Four things that do not help

  • The keywords meta tag. Google has said since 2009 that web search disregards it.
  • FAQ rich results. Limited to government and health sites in 2023, then removed from Google Search entirely in May 2026. We do not ship FAQPage markup to chase a result that is gone.
  • A sitemap full of old, redirected, or noindex URLs. A sitemap is a hint. A dirty one is a bad hint.
  • Blocking CSS or JavaScript in robots.txt. Google needs those files to render the page. Blocking them does not hide the content. It hides the layout from the crawler that has to understand it.

Core Web Vitals are field data after you have traffic. A lab score on a laptop is not the p75 your visitors experience. We still keep the page small, because a slow page is a bad page whether or not it moves a chart.

AI features, Technical requirements, Title links, Keywords meta, lastmod.

Custom websites include this in the build. It is not a retainer we sell afterwards.