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.
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.
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.
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.
Core Web Vitals are not just important for Google rankings. AI models prefer fast, stable websites when selecting sources. Discover how LCP, INP and CLS influence your AI visibility.
