11 Technical Signals That Determine If AI Search Engines Can Find Your Website

Google sends you a link and lets you click. ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini read your site for you and decide whether to mention it at all. That distinction changes everything about technical SEO. I spent the last few months reverse-engineering how AI search engines discover, evaluate, and cite websites. The result is a list of 11 concrete technical signals you can audit today. No fluff - just the checks that matter and the fixes that work. How AI Search Discovery Actually Works Traditional search engines crawl your pages, index keywords, and rank links.