Bots read fast pages too: what we reprioritised after an AI-crawler audit (opens in new tab)

We ran a small audit last winter because a client asked whether GPTBot could "see" their new help centre. Search Console looked fine. PageSpeed Insights on the homepage looked fine. Server logs told a different story: long tail URLs timing out, a category template returning a JavaScript shell on the first response, and a /robots.txt rule that blocked one path the marketing team had already pitched for AI Overviews. Nothing in that list was exotic. It was the kind of drift you only notice when...