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.
A slow server is not just annoying for visitors, it is a dealbreaker for AI bots. TTFB above 500ms? Then you lose crawls, indexation and ultimately AI citations. This is how you fix it, from twenty years of hosting and performance experience.
WordPress, Laravel, headless: your CMS choice determines how clean your HTML is and how well AI models understand your content. An honest opinion piece about the platforms I encounter daily. Spoiler: it is not about which CMS you pick, but how you use it.
Lazy loading is fantastic for speed. But AI crawlers do not scroll, do not click and do not execute JavaScript. If your content sits behind a lazy load, that content simply does not exist for AI. Time to fix that.
TTFB. Four letters that make the difference between being cited by AI or being forgotten. After twenty years of obsessively optimizing servers I explain why those first hundred milliseconds determine everything.
That plugin you installed five years ago and forgot to remove? It is probably costing you AI citations. Technical debt is not just ugly under the hood. It is a direct barrier for AI models trying to understand your content.
You can have perfect content and beautiful structured data, but if your hosting does not cooperate, it never reaches AI crawlers. After twenty years of managing hosting I know: this is the most underestimated pillar of AI visibility.
Accessibility and AI readiness are two sides of the same coin. The same semantic HTML a screen reader needs is exactly what AI models use to understand your content. Two birds with one stone, yet almost nobody gets it right.
You can have the most beautiful schema.org markup and a flawless llms.txt. But if your server needs two seconds to wake up, you are already old news to AI crawlers. Performance is not a nice-to-have. It is the absolute foundation.
Google's metrics for user experience: loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability.
The automated scanning of websites by search engines and AI bots to discover content.
Filter navigation in webshops that creates SEO challenges through thousands of URL combinations.
Numeric codes returned by a web server indicating the status of a request.
Google's approach where the mobile version of a website is the primary version for indexing.
Generating HTML on the server so crawlers and AI bots can read the full content immediately.
