202: Aleyda Solís: AI search crawlability and why your site’s technical foundations decide your visibility

What’s up everyone, today we have the honor of sitting down with Aleyda Solís, SEO and AI search consultant.

• (00:00) - Intro
• (01:17) - In This Episode
• (04:55) - Crawlability Requirements for AI Search Engines
• (12:21) - LLMs As A New Search Channel In A Multi Platform Discovery System
• (18:42) - AI Search Visibility Analysis for SEO Teams
• (29:17) - Creating Brand Led Informational Content for AI Search
• (35:51) - Choosing SEO Topics That Drive Brand-Aligned Demand
• (45:50) - How Topic Level Analysis Shapes AI Search Strategy
• (50:01) - LLM Search Console Reporting Expectations
• (52:09) - Why LLM Search Rewards Brands With Real Community Signals
• (55:12) - Prioritizing Work That Matches Personal Purpose

Summary: AI search is rewriting how people find information, and Aleyda explains the shift with clear, practical detail. She has seen AI crawlers blocked without anyone noticing, JavaScript hiding full sections of sites, and brands interpreting results that were never based on complete data. She shows how users now move freely between Google, TikTok, Instagram, and LLMs, which pushes teams to treat discovery as a multi-platform system. She encourages you to verify your AI visibility, publish content rooted in real customer language, and use topic clusters to anchor strategy when prompts scatter. Her closing point is simple. Community chatter now shapes authority, and AI models pay close attention to it.

About Aleyda

Aleyda Solís is an international SEO and AI search optimization consultant, speaker, and author who leads Orainti, the boutique consultancy known for solving complex, multi-market SEO challenges. She’s worked with brands across ecommerce, SaaS, and global marketplaces, helping teams rebuild search foundations and scale sustainable organic growth.

She also runs three of the industry’s most trusted newsletters; SEOFOMO, MarketingFOMO, and AI Marketers, where she filters the noise into the updates that genuinely matter. Her free roadmaps, LearningSEO.io and LearningAIsearch.com, give marketers a clear, reliable path to building real skills in both SEO and AI search.

Crawlability Requirements for AI Search Engines

Crawlability shapes everything that follows in AI search. Aleyda talks about it with the tone of someone who has seen far too many sites fail the basics. AI crawlers behave differently from traditional search engines, and they hit roadblocks that most teams never think about. Hosting rules, CDN settings, and robots files often permit Googlebot but quietly block newer user agents. You can hear the frustration in her voice when she describes audit after audit where AI crawlers never reach critical sections of a site.

"You need to allow AI crawlers to access your content. The rules you set might need to be different depending on your context."

AI crawlers also refuse to process JavaScript. They ingest raw markup and move on. Sites that lean heavily on client-side rendering lose entire menus, product details, pricing tables, and conversion paths. Aleyda describes this as a structural issue that forces marketers to confront their technical debt. Many teams have spent years building front-ends with layers of JavaScript because Google eventually figured out how to handle it. AI crawlers skip that entire pipeline. Simpler pages load faster, reveal hierarchy immediately, and give AI models a complete picture without extra processing.

Search behavior adds new pressure. Aleyda points to OpenAI’s published research showing a rise in task-oriented queries. Users ask models to complete goals directly and skip the page-by-page exploration we grew up optimizing for. You need clarity about which tasks intersect with your offerings. You need to build content that satisfies those tasks without guessing blindly. Aleyda urges teams to validate this with real user understanding because generic keyword tools cannot describe these new behaviors accurately.

Authority signals shift too. Mentions across credible communities carry weight inside AI summaries. Aleyda explains it as a natural extension of digital PR. Forums, newsletters, podcasts, social communities, and industry roundups form a reputation map that AI crawlers use as context. Backlinks still matter, but mentions create presence in a wider set of conversations. Strong SEO programs already invest in this work, but many teams still chase link volume while ignoring the broader network of references that shape brand perception.

Measurement evolves alongside all of this. Aleyda encourages operators to treat AI search as both a performance channel and a visibility channel. You track presence inside responses. You track sentiment and frequency. You monitor competitors that appear beside you or ahead of you. You map how often your brand appears in summaries that influence purchase decisions. Rankings and click curves do not capture the full picture. A broader measurement model captures what these new systems actually distribute.

Key takeaway: Build crawlability for AI search with intention. Confirm that AI crawlers can access your content, and remove JavaScript barriers that hide essential information. Map the task-driven behaviors that align with your products so you invest in content that meets real user goals. Strengthen your reputation footprint by earning mentions in communities that influence AI summaries. Expand your measurement model so you can track visibility, sentiment, and placement inside AI-generated results. That way you can compete in a search environment shaped by new rules and new signals.

LLMs As A New Search Channel In A Multi Platform Discovery System

SEO keeps getting declared dead every time Google ships a new interface, yet actual search behavior keeps spreading across more surfaces. Aleyda reacted to the “LLMs as a new channel” framing with immediate agreement because she sees teams wrestling with a bigger shift. They still treat Google as the only gatekeeper, even though users now ask questions, compare products, and verify credibility across several platforms at once. LLMs, TikTok, Instagram, and traditional search engines all function as parallel discovery layers, and the companies that hesitate to accept this trend end up confused about where SEO fits.

Aleyda pointed to the industry’s long dependence on Google and described how that dependence shaped expectations. Many teams built an entire worldview around a single SERP format, a single set of ranking factors, and a single customer entry point. Interface changes feel existential because the discipline was defined too narrowly for too long. She sees this tension inside consulting projects when stakeholders ask whether SEO is dying instead of asking where their audience now searches for answers.

Retail clients provided her clearest examples. They already treat TikTok and Instagram as core search environments. They ask for guidance on how to structure content so it gets discovered through platform specific signals. They ask for clarity on how product intent gets inferred through tags, comments, watch time, and creator interactions. Their questions treat search as a distributed system, and their behavior hints at what the wider market will adopt. Aleyda considers this a preview, because younger customers rarely begin their journey inside a traditional search engine.

Her story from a conference in China made the point even sharper. She explained how Baidu no longer carries the gravitational pull many Western marketers assume. People gather information through Red Note, Douyin, and several specialized platforms, and they assemble answers through a blend of formats. That experience changed Aleyda’s expectations for Western markets. She believes...