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For most of its history, SEO has been a reactive discipline, being asked to “make it rank” once a site is built, with little input into the process.Even crazier, most SEO professionals are assigned a set of key performance indicators (KPIs) for which they are accountable, metrics tied to visibility, engagement, and revenue.
Still, they have no real control over the underlying systems that affect them. These metrics often rely on the performance of disconnected teams, including content, engineering, brand, and product, which don’t always share the same objectives.
When my previous agency, Global Strategies, was acquired by Ogilvy, I recommended that our team be viewed as building inspectors, not just an SEO package upsell added at the end, but involved at key phases when architects, engineers, and tradespeople had laid out the structural components.
Ideally, we’d come in after the site framing (wireframes) was complete, reviewing the plumbing (information architecture), electrical (navigation and links), and foundation (technical performance), but before the drywall and paint obscured what lies beneath.
We’d validate that the right materials were used and that construction followed a standard fit for long-term performance.
However, in reality, we were rarely invited into the planning stages because that was creative, and we were just SEO. We were usually brought in only after launch, tasked with fixing what had already been buried behind a visually appealing design.
Despite fighting for it, I was never a complete fan of this model; it made sense in the early days of search, when websites were simple, and ranking factors were more forgiving.
SEO practitioners identified crawl issues, adjusted metadata, optimized titles, fixed broken links, and retrofitted pages with keywords and internal links.
That said, I have long advocated for eliminating the need for most SEO actions by integrating the fixes into the roles and workflows that initially broke them.
Through education, process change, and content management system (CMS) innovation, much of what SEO fixes could, and should, become standard practice.
However, this has been a challenging sell, as SEO has often been viewed as less important than design, development, or content creation.
It was easier to assign SEO the role of cleanup crew rather than bake best practices into upstream systems and roles. We worked around CMS limitations, cleaned up after redesigns, and tried to reverse-engineer what Google wanted from the outside in.
But that role of identifying and fixing defects is no longer enough. And in the AI-driven search environment, it’s becoming obsolete.
Search Has Changed. Our Role Must Too.
Search engines today do far more than index and rank webpages. They extract answers, synthesize responses, and generate real-time content previews.
What used to be a linear search journey (query > list of links > website) has become a multi-layered ecosystem of zero-click answers, AI summaries, featured snippets, and voice responses.
Traditional SEO tactics, indexability, content relevance, and backlinks still matter in this environment, but only as part of a larger system.
The new currency of visibility is semantic clarity, machine-readability, and multi-system integration. SEO is no longer about optimizing a page. It’s about orchestrating a system.
This complexity requires us to transition from being just an inspector to becoming the Commissioning Authority (CxA) to meet the demands of this shift.
What Is A Commissioning Authority?
In modern architecture and construction, a Commissioning Authority is a specialized professional who ensures that all building systems, including HVAC, electrical, plumbing, safety, and lighting, function as intended in combination.
They are brought in not just to inspect but also to validate, test, and orchestrate performance.
They work on behalf of the building owner, aligning the construction output with the original design intent and operational goals. They look at interoperability, performance efficiency, long-term sustainability, and documentation.
They are not passive checkers. They are active enablers of success.
Why SEO Needs Commissioning Authorities
The modern website is no longer a standalone asset. It is a network of interconnected systems:

Content strategy.
CMS structure.
Design and front-end frameworks.
Analytics and tagging layers
Schema and structured data.
Internationalization and localization.
Page speed and Core Web Vitals.
AI answer optimization.

Today’s SEO, or whatever the latest alphabet soup acronym du jour is, and especially tomorrow, must be a Commissioning Authority for these systems. That means:

Being involved at the blueprint stage, not just post-launch.
Advocating for search visibility as a performance outcome.
Ensuring that semantic signals, not just visual elements, are embedded in every page.
Testing and validating that the site performs in AI environments, not just traditional search engine results pages (SERPs).

The Rise Of The Relevance Engineer
A key function within this evolved CxA role is that of the Relevance Engineer, a concept and term introduced by Mike King of iPullRank.
Mike has been one of the most vocal and insightful leaders on the transformation of SEO in the AI era, and his view is clear: The discipline must fundamentally evolve, both in practice and in how it is positioned within organizations.
Mike King’s perspective underscores that treating AI-driven search as simply an extension of traditional SEO is dangerously misguided.
Instead, we must embrace a new function, Relevance Engineering, which focuses on optimizing for semantic alignment, passage-level competitiveness, and probabilistic rankings, rather than deterministic keyword-based tactics.
The Relevance Engineer ensures:

Each content element is structured and chunked for generative AI consumption.
Content addresses layered user intent, from informational to transactional.
Schema markup and internal linking reinforce topical authority and entity associations.
The site’s architecture supports passage-level understanding and AI summarization.

In many ways, the Relevance Engineer is the semantic strategist of the SEO team, working hand-in-hand with designers, developers, and content creators to ensure that relevance is not assumed but engineered.
In construction terms, this might resemble a systems integration specialist. This expert ensures that electrical, plumbing, HVAC, and automation systems function individually and operate cohesively within an innovative building environment.
Relevance Engineering is more than a title; it’s a mindset shift. It emphasizes that SEO must now live at the intersection of information science, user experience, and machine interpretability.
From Inspector To CxA: How The Role Shifts

SEO Pillar
Old Role: Building Inspector
New Role: Commissioning Authority

Indexability
Check crawl blocks after build
Design architecture for accessibility and rendering

Relevance
Patch in keywords post-launch
Map content to entity models and query intent upfront, guided by a Relevance Engineer

Authority
Chase links to weak content
Build a structured reputation and concept ownership

Clickability
Tweak titles and meta descriptions
Structure content for AI previews, snippets, and voice answers

User Experience
Flag issues in testing
Embed UX, speed, and clarity into the initial design

Looking Ahead: The Next Generation Of SEO
As AI continues to reshape search behavior, SEO pros must adapt again. We will need to:

Understand how content is deconstructed and repackaged by large language models (LLMs).
Ensure that our information is structured, chunked, and semantically aligned to be eligible for synthesis.
Advocate for knowledge modeling, not just keyword optimization.
Encourage cross-functional integration between content, engineering, design, and analytics.

The next generation of SEO leaders will not be optimization specialists.
They will be systems thinkers, semantic strategists, digital performance architects, storytellers, performance coaches, and importantly, master negotiators to advocate and steer the necessary organizational, infrastructural, and content changes to thrive.
They will also be force multipliers – individuals or teams who amplify the effectiveness of everyone else in the process.
By embedding structured, AI-ready practices into the workflow, they enable content teams, developers, and marketers to do their jobs better and more efficiently.
The Relevance Engineer and Commissioning Authority roles are not just tactical additions but strategic leverage points that unlock exponential impact across the digital organization.
Final Thought
Too much article space has been wasted arguing over what to call this new era – whether SEO is dead, what the acronym should be, or what might or might not be part of the future.
Meanwhile, far too little attention has been devoted to the structural and intellectual shifts organizations must make to remain competitive in a search environment reshaped by AI.
Suppose we, as an industry, do not start changing the rules, roles, and mindset now. In that case, we’ll again be scrambling when the CEO demands to know why the company missed profitability targets, only to realize we’re buying back traffic we should have earned.
We’ve spent 30 years trying to retrofit what others built into something functional for search engines – pushing massive boulders uphill to shift monoliths into integrated digital machines. That era is over.
The brands that will thrive in the AI search era are those that elevate SEO from a reactive function to a strategic discipline with a seat at the planning table.
The professionals who succeed will be those who speak the language of systems, semantics, and sustained performance – and who take an active role in shaping the digital infrastructure.
The future of SEO is not about tweaking; it’s about taking the reins. It’s about stepping into the role of Commissioning Authority, aligning stakeholders, systems, and semantics.
And at its core, it will be driven by the precision of relevance engineering, and amplified by the force multiplier effect of integrated, strategic influence.
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Featured Image: Jack_the_sparow/Shutterstock

For all the noise around keywords, content strategy, and AI-generated summaries, technical SEO still determines whether your content gets seen in the first place.You can have the most brilliant blog post or perfectly phrased product page, but if your site architecture looks like an episode of “Hoarders” or your crawl budget is wasted on junk pages, you’re invisible.
So, let’s talk about technical SEO – not as an audit checklist, but as a growth lever.
If you’re still treating it like a one-time setup or a background task for your dev team, you’re leaving visibility (and revenue) on the table.
This isn’t about obsessing over Lighthouse scores or chasing 100s in Core Web Vitals. It’s about making your site easier for search engines to crawl, parse, and prioritize, especially as AI transforms how discovery works.
Crawl Efficiency Is Your SEO Infrastructure
Before we talk tactics, let’s align on a key truth: Your site’s crawl efficiency determines how much of your content gets indexed, updated, and ranked.
Crawl efficiency is equal to how well search engines can access and process the pages that actually matter.
The longer your site’s been around, the more likely it’s accumulated detritus – outdated pages, redirect chains, orphaned content, bloated JavaScript, pagination issues, parameter duplicates, and entire subfolders that no longer serve a purpose. Every one of these gets in Googlebot’s way.
Improving crawl efficiency doesn’t mean “getting more crawled.” It means helping search engines waste less time on garbage so they can focus on what matters.
Technical SEO Areas That Actually Move The Needle
Let’s skip the obvious stuff and get into what’s actually working in 2025, shall we?
1. Optimize For Discovery, Not “Flatness”
There’s a long-standing myth that search engines prefer flat architecture. Let’s be clear: Search engines prefer accessible architecture, not shallow architecture.
A deep, well-organized structure doesn’t hurt your rankings. It helps everything else work better.
Logical nesting supports crawl efficiency, elegant redirects, and robots.txt rules, and makes life significantly easier when it comes to content maintenance, analytics, and reporting.
Fix it: Focus on internal discoverability.
If a critical page is five clicks away from your homepage, that’s the problem, not whether the URL lives at /products/widgets/ or /docs/api/v2/authentication.
Use curated hubs, cross-linking, and HTML sitemaps to elevate key pages. But resist flattening everything into the root – that’s not helping anyone.
Example: A product page like /products/waterproof-jackets/mens/blue-mountain-parkas provides clear topical context, simplifies redirects, and enables smarter segmentation in analytics.
By contrast, dumping everything into the root turns Google Analytics 4 analysis into a nightmare.
Want to measure how your documentation is performing? That’s easy if it all lives under /documentation/. Nearly impossible if it’s scattered across flat, ungrouped URLs.
Pro tip: For blogs, I prefer categories or topical tags in the URL (e.g., /blog/technical-seo/structured-data-guide) instead of timestamps.
Dated URLs make content look stale – even if it’s fresh – and provide no value in understanding performance by topic or theme.
In short: organized ≠ buried. Smart nesting supports clarity, crawlability, and conversion tracking. Flattening everything for the sake of myth-based SEO advice just creates chaos.
2. Eliminate Crawl Waste
Google has a crawl budget for every site. The bigger and more complex your site, the more likely you’re wasting that budget on low-value URLs.
Common offenders:

Calendar pages (hello, faceted navigation).
Internal search results.
Staging or dev environments accidentally left open.
Infinite scroll that generates URLs but not value.
Endless UTM-tagged duplicates.

Fix it: Audit your crawl logs.
Disallow junk in robots.txt. Use canonical tags correctly. Prune unnecessary indexable pages. And yes, finally remove that 20,000-page tag archive that no one – human or robot – has ever wanted to read.
3. Fix Your Redirect Chains
Redirects are often slapped together in emergencies and rarely revisited. But every extra hop adds latency, wastes crawl budget, and can fracture link equity.
Fix it: Run a redirect map quarterly.
Collapse chains into single-step redirects. Wherever possible, update internal links to point directly to the final destination URL instead of bouncing through a series of legacy URLs.
Clean redirect logic makes your site faster, clearer, and far easier to maintain, especially when doing platform migrations or content audits.
And yes, elegant redirect rules require structured URLs. Flat sites make this harder, not easier.
4. Don’t Hide Links Inside JavaScript
Google can render JavaScript, but large language models generally don’t. And even Google doesn’t render every page immediately or consistently.
If your key links are injected via JavaScript or hidden behind search boxes, modals, or interactive elements, you’re choking off both crawl access and AI visibility.
Fix it: Expose your navigation, support content, and product details via crawlable, static HTML wherever possible.
LLMs like those powering AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity don’t click or type. If your knowledge base or documentation is only accessible after a user types into a search box, LLMs won’t see it – and won’t cite it.
Real talk: If your official support content isn’t visible to LLMs, they’ll pull answers from Reddit, old blog posts, or someone else’s guesswork. That’s how incorrect or outdated information becomes the default AI response for your product.
Solution: Maintain a static, browsable version of your support center. Use real anchor links, not JavaScript-triggered overlays. Make your help content easy to find and even easier to crawl.
Invisible content doesn’t just miss out on rankings. It gets overwritten by whatever is visible. If you don’t control the narrative, someone else will.
5. Handle Pagination And Parameters With Intention
Infinite scroll, poorly handled pagination, and uncontrolled URL parameters can clutter crawl paths and fragment authority.
It’s not just an indexing issue. It’s a maintenance nightmare and a signal dilution risk.
Fix it: Prioritize crawl clarity and minimize redundant URLs.
While rel=”next”/rel=”prev” still gets thrown around in technical SEO advice, Google retired support years ago, and most content management systems don’t implement it correctly anyway.
Instead, focus on:

Using crawlable, path-based pagination formats (e.g., /blog/page/2/) instead of query parameters like ?page=2. Google often crawls but doesn’t index parameter-based pagination, and LLMs will likely ignore it entirely.
Ensuring paginated pages contain unique or at least additive content, not clones of page one.
Avoiding canonical tags that point every paginated page back to page one that tells search engines to ignore the rest of your content.
Using robots.txt or meta noindex for thin or duplicate parameter combinations (especially in filtered or faceted listings).
Defining parameter behavior in Google Search Console only if you have a clear, deliberate strategy. Otherwise, you’re more likely to shoot yourself in the foot.

Pro tip: Don’t rely on client-side JavaScript to build paginated lists. If your content is only accessible via infinite scroll or rendered after user interaction, it’s likely invisible to both search crawlers and LLMs.
Good pagination quietly supports discovery. Bad pagination quietly destroys it.
Crawl Optimization And AI: Why This Matters More Than Ever
You might be wondering, “With AI Overviews and LLM-powered answers rewriting the SERP, does crawl optimization still matter?”
Yes. More than ever.
Pourquoi? AI-generated summaries still rely on indexed, trusted content. If your content doesn’t get crawled, it doesn’t get indexed. If it’s not indexed, it doesn’t get cited. And if it’s not cited, you don’t exist in the AI-generated answer layer.
AI search agents (Google, Perplexity, ChatGPT with browsing) don’t pull full pages; they extract chunks of information. Paragraphs, sentences, lists. That means your content architecture needs to be extractable. And that starts with crawlability.
If you want to understand how that content gets interpreted – and how to structure yours for maximum visibility – this guide on how LLMs interpret content breaks it down step by step.
Remember, you can’t show up in AI Overviews if Google can’t reliably crawl and understand your content.
Bonus: Crawl Efficiency For Site Health
Efficient crawling is more than an indexing benefit. It’s a canary in the coal mine for technical debt.
If your crawl logs show thousands of pages no longer relevant, or crawlers are spending 80% of their time on pages you don’t care about, it means your site is disorganized. It’s a signal.
Clean it up, and you’ll improve everything from performance to user experience to reporting accuracy.
What To Prioritize This Quarter
If you’re short on time and resources, focus here:

Crawl Budget Triage: Review crawl logs and identify where Googlebot is wasting time.
Internal Link Optimization: Ensure your most important pages are easily discoverable.
Remove Crawl Traps: Close off dead ends, duplicate URLs, and infinite spaces.
JavaScript Rendering Review: Use tools like Google’s URL Inspection Tool to verify what’s visible.
Eliminate Redirect Hops: Especially on money pages and high-traffic sections.

These are not theoretical improvements. They translate directly into better rankings, faster indexing, and more efficient content discovery.
TL;DR: Keywords Matter Less If You’re Not Crawlable
Technical SEO isn’t the sexy part of search, but it’s the part that enables everything else to work.
If you’re not prioritizing crawl efficiency, you’re asking Google to work harder to rank you. And in a world where AI-powered search demands clarity, speed, and trust – that’s a losing bet.
Fix your crawl infrastructure. Then, focus on content, keywords, and experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T). In that order.
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Featured Image: Candy Shapes/Shutterstock