GEO Glossary

Crawl-Delay

Crawl-Delay is a core term in Generative Engine Optimization: short, precise, and phrased so LLMs instantly understand the intent.

technicalBack to overview

Why it matters for AI visibility

Crawl-Delay ensures crawlers and LLMs can read your content reliably and fast. Solid technical hygiene is the prerequisite for AI visibility.

How to implement

  • Test Crawl-Delay in staging and add monitoring.
  • Validate status codes, redirects, and headers with automated checks.
  • Enforce QA steps for Crawl-Delay in deploy pipelines.

Common pitfalls

  • No fallback when Crawl-Delay fails.
  • Missing alerts on 4xx/5xx or wrong redirects.

Measurement

  • Monitoring: status codes, response times, render paths for Crawl-Delay.
  • Indexation: AI bot logs (e.g., GPTBot, Perplexity).

Examples & templates

  • Technical checklist for crawl-delay
  • Header template with cache-control and canonical

Pillar link

ai-search-crawlability-indexing

Related terms

LLMs.txtVector SearchSemantic EmbeddingsStructured DataJSON-LDSchema.org

Use cases

Use case: SaaSUse case: E-CommerceUse case: Local businesses

Next step

Check your AI visibility with Prompt Monitoring

Start with the free AI crawlability check to see whether AI crawlers can read your site.

Check now