AI Search Visibility:
The Need For Speed

AI search is rapidly increasing worldwide and it’s rewriting the rules of the online visibility of your website or brand. 

 

We believed that If search engines can easily crawl your website and index your material, then chatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and other AI search tools should be able to do the same. Well this assumption seems not to be 100% true any longer: Strong Google rankings don’t necessarily ensure visibility in AI.

 

➮ Web Performance is Vitale

 

Dan Taylor at SALT.agency has recently published a detailed analysis on how web-performance metrics correlate with visibility in AI-generated answers.

And the response is: “Performance improvements do more than enhance user experience. They directly increase the probability of being cited or surfaced by AI systems.”
 

From an analysis of 2,138 websites mentioned by AI tools:

• Websites with Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) ≤ 0.1 had a 29.8% higher inclusion rate in generative AI summaries compared with sites above that threshold.
• Pages with Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) ≤ 2.5 seconds were 1.47 times more likely to appear in AI outputs than slower pages.
• Crawlers (for AI-tools) abandoned requests for 18% of pages where the HTML size was larger than one megabyte—highlighting how “heavy” pages get skipped.
• Time to First Byte (TTFB) under 200 milliseconds correlated with a 22% increase in citation density (i.e., more frequent citations by AI systems).
• Page structure impacts inclusion: pages where the “main content” was pushed far down (due to banners, large carousels, ad blocks) had lower inclusion rates in AI summaries. SALT.agency®

Image from SALT.agency

The conclusion here is simple: Pages passing Core Web Vitals are more likely to be crawled, cited, and included in AI-powered answers, regardless of the platform.

 

➮ Fast Sites Win: AI Crawlers Don’t Have Time to Waste

 

AI tools like ChatGPT handle billions of prompts every day, and to answer them, they often rely on web crawlers that fetch fresh information in real time. ChatGPT’s crawler (ChatGPT-User) is extremely active — in one week it visited the SALT.agency website about 6,000 times, far more than Google’s crawler did.

All this crawling requires massive computing power. OpenAI says its future operations could need around 10 gigawatts — the output of about 10 nuclear reactors. When a website is slow or inefficient, the crawler spends even more resources trying to read it.

As demand grows, the cost of crawling the web will only increase. That means AI platforms will likely start favoring faster, easier-to-read websites and may avoid ones that waste computing resources. 

 

➮ Performance Isn’t a Nice-to-Have — It’s Essential

 

Not every website will experience the exact same impact, but the data shared here strongly suggests that Core Web Vitals matter. When you fix the basics, here are some of the improvements you can expect:
 

👍 What Good Core Web Vitals Give You

• Higher Conversion Rates: 3–5x better than slow sites
• More Revenue per Visitor: Up to 9.2% higher average order value
• Lower Abandonment: 24% less page abandonment
• AI Visibility: 30–47% higher inclusion in AI search results
• Customer Retention: 91% retention vs. massive bounce rates

 

👎 What Poor Core Web Vitals Cost You

• Lost conversions every single day
• Higher bounce rates
• Invisible to AI search engines
• Frustrated customers who go to competitors
• Wasted ad spend (e.g., poor landing page experience)
   

We’ve been saying it for a while now: good web performance really does matter. Get your site AI-ready today because your visibility tomorrow depends on it.

And stay tuned for our new product Perfa – a website builder designed for humans, loved by machines.

Sources:
Technical SEO for AI Search
SALT.agency
The Technical SEO Debt That Will Destroy Your AI Visibility
Search Engine Journal - SEO, Search Marketing News and Tutorials
Core Web Vitals – Essential metrics for a Healthy site.
Web.dev

November 2025