Technical accessibility
Whether a machine can fetch and read your page at all: status codes, response speed, robots rules and content that exists without JavaScript. It is the precondition for every other signal.
Updated August 21, 2026
This is the least glamorous signal and the one that most often explains a bad result outright. A page behind a blocked path, a slow response, a redirect chain or a script-only render is not judged harshly by an answer engine; it is simply never considered. Fixing accessibility rarely improves anything by itself, but nothing else you fix counts until it is right.
Related terms
- Client-side rendering. Building the page in the visitor's browser with JavaScript instead of sending finished HTML. Crawlers that do not run scripts see an empty shell where your content should be.
- robots.txt. A file at the root of your site telling automated visitors which paths they may fetch. Many AI crawlers respect it, so a careless rule here can quietly remove you from AI answers entirely.
- Crawler (bot). An automated program that fetches web pages. Search engines and AI systems use crawlers to read the web. Crawlers read the raw page and often do not run all of a site's scripts.