I have been building websites for over twenty years. That sounds like a long time, and it is.
What started as a fascination with fast, accessible sites grew into Kobalt. Hundreds of websites built, optimized, hosted. My obsession? Always the same: performance first. Every millisecond counts. For your visitors, but also for the crawlers trying to understand your site.
When AI models increasingly started using web content as a source, I immediately saw the parallel with accessibility. Just as you build for everyone, you now also need to build for AI. That conviction led to AEO Expert.
Outside of work, I prefer to be outdoors. I have played baseball since I was seven (yes, really) and now coach as well. On weekends you will find me with my family at the baseball and softball fields.
And when I am not on the field? I walk through nature trying to identify every bird I encounter. That combination of precision and patience turns out to be surprisingly useful when building websites. Though my wife says I take it a bit too seriously. Both.
From 56k modems to AI crawlers. The technology changes. The lesson does not. After twenty years of building, optimizing, and yes, making mistakes too, my conclusion is always the same: start with speed. The rest follows.
HTTP/1.1 is over 25 years old. And your server is probably still running it. Learn what HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 concretely do for AI crawlers, why multiplexing is a game changer, and how to enable it today.
Seven layers of div nesting for a simple paragraph. I am not exaggerating. Semantic HTML is the difference between a website AI models understand and an impenetrable mess of div elements. And it takes you an afternoon to fix.
I have a checklist. Four steps, about two hours, and you know exactly where your website stands in terms of AI readiness. No vague advice, but concrete points you can fix tomorrow. This is how I run an AI audit at Kobalt.
That 8 euros a month on shared hosting feels like a bargain. Until you discover AI crawlers systematically skip your site because your neighbor on the same server just blasted a newsletter to 40,000 people. An honest story about hosting and AI visibility.
Properly labeled forms with good semantic HTML help not only users with disabilities — they also give AI models context about how your page is structured. Reinier on ARIA labels, fieldsets and why a contact form is more than a few input fields.
How you load web fonts directly affects your Largest Contentful Paint and therefore how quickly AI crawlers consider your page complete. Reinier shares his opinionated approach: font-display swap, subsetting and when you just use a system font stack.
Sustainable hosting is not just ethically smart — it also sends trust signals that AI models and search engines value. Reinier's no-nonsense view on green hosting as a business case, not a marketing story.
If your site is down when an AI crawler visits, you miss a citation opportunity that may not return for weeks. After twenty years managing hosting infrastructure, Reinier knows: monitoring is not a luxury but a basic requirement.
Sites scoring 90+ on Google Lighthouse also tend to get cited more by AI models. Reinier explains the connection using Kobalt audit data and argues that performance is the silent engine behind AI visibility.
Caching is the fastest way to make your website fast for humans and AI bots. But not all caching is equal. Edge caching, Redis, cache warming: this is how we approach it at Kobalt, and why it works.
Images are the heaviest part of most websites. Well optimized they improve your load time and AI visibility. Poorly optimized they cost you both. A practical guide, including the mistake I made myself for years.
