Building a technically sound site is the developer's responsibility. What happens to that site's visibility after launch in traditional search, in AI-generated answers, and across the broader web is where growing businesses lose momentum.
Technical SEO failures at launch are the result of no one explicitly owning the bridge between engineering and search. This checklist is for developers who want to close that gap before going live.
Today, search isn't just Google crawling your pages and ranking them, AI systems like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Mode, Gemini are synthesising answers from your content and either citing your site or not. The technical foundation that earns those citations overlaps heavily with traditional SEO.
1. Crawlability and Indexation
This is the most basic requirement, search engines need to be able to find and read your pages. While it sounds obvious, it's where most pre-launch failures happen.
