Most agencies I talk to want to sell AI search as something brand new. Erika Braeger, Director of Strategy at Ten Speed, starts with the oldest question in the audit: can a machine read the site? When I asked her on Unscripted SEO what the most consequential part of SEO is right now, she said machine readability, and zoomed in, technical SEO. If you run audits for clients, here’s the order she works in, pulled from our second conversation. Her first episode covered confident teams and what AI cites.
Start the audit with speed and redirects
Here’s her reasoning in one breath.
Because if a machine cannot easily parse and understand your site, then it’s going to be much more difficult for you to show up in AIOs, for you to show up in AI mode, in organic search, in LLM search. — Erika Braeger
Her number-one pitfalls are page speed and technical debt that has ballooned from URL updates. You’ve seen both. A client sunsets a section, nobody redirects it, and the internal links keep pointing at it. Not every technical SEO ranks speed that high, though. Eva Mermingi’s audit order puts Core Web Vitals after duplication, links and indexation.
They sunsetted a blog, but it wasn’t redirected, and because it was so frequently linked across the site, it created 4xxs. — Erika Braeger
That happened the week we recorded. Every unredirected URL change adds 3xx and 4xx errors, and the more URLs change, the faster the pile grows. If your team needs a refresher, here’s how to properly redirect pages with 301 redirects, and Ten Speed’s list of common technical SEO issues covers the rest.
Sell speed with a competitor comparison
You’ll get the question: does it really matter how fast my site is? Erika doesn’t lead with a study. She compares.
When a client is struggling to hold a position in a SERP or an LLM, or has already lost it, she runs page speed across the two or three competitors that pulled ahead. If the client is slower and that’s the biggest difference she can find, that’s the pitch. I like to add the 2012 Walmart study: up to 2% more conversions for every second of load time saved, and up to 1% more revenue for every 100 ms. Erika’s B2B SaaS version is sharper. A bounce on a store costs one sale. A bounce in SaaS costs recurring revenue.
Where she looks first
- Images sized incorrectly, which slow the load and can create layout shifts.
- Third-party JavaScript firing before user-facing content when it could fire after.
- Video that isn’t set to an iframe, autoplays, or runs motion graphics.
- Lazy loading on the hero image. Keep lazy loading below the fold.
I’ve seen where a blog image, like the hero image of the blog or a hero image of a core page, is set to lazy load, and that can really scramble things. — Erika Braeger
For images, she gives clients a good, better, best set of options, because what’s possible depends on their server and what their devs can do.
Put every page on a two-megabyte budget
Erika’s rule of thumb is two megabytes or less per page, ideally a lot less.
It’s not that the crawler is going to pass you over, but it’s going to take a lot more time. — Erika Braeger
When a page nears the line, ask what’s adding the weight: a video, an image, a motion graphic, a form fill, a reCAPTCHA. Then decide whether to replace it, modify it or remove it. That’s a clean line item for an audit deliverable, and in my experience a client acts on removing an autoplay video faster than on a score.
Turn Erika’s sampling and page-weight triage into a procedure with the SEO SOP: Find Global Page Speed Fixes by Sampling Five Pages – the one-page PDF is free inside The Vault.
Let Claude read the crawl, but make the calls yourself
Parsing a Screaming Frog crawl takes time, and you have to know what you’re looking for. Erika uses Claude as a second set of eyes.
If you can upload chunks of a Screaming Frog crawl into Claude, it’s able to surface things and prioritize much more quickly than if you were to just look through the crawl on your own. — Erika Braeger
She’s clear that you make your own decisions before you feed it anything. The win is speed and presentation, since Claude turns the findings into graphs that look good to clients. If you want a starting list of what to look for, here are 7 quick wins hiding in your last SEO crawl.
Ship the global fixes first to win enterprise buy-in
Enterprise technical SEO usually means tickets, PRs and someone else’s sprint. Erika picks the global, big ticket items first, because that’s what moves the needle. When a fix lands, she takes the win to every team it touches.
One client is cleaning up two years of tech debt in 90 days. She sends them new work every week, ordered by what will move the needle most, and her one takeaway for anyone starting that kind of cleanup is about sampling.
Don’t sample only a singular page because not every page is going to tell the same story. — Erika Braeger
Sample four or five pages and you’ll see which fixes are global. After that, the AI side: Erika now puts heavier weight on EEAT and schema, which Ten Speed lays out in its 12-week generative engine optimization rollout plan.
So before your next audit goes out, ask yourself a few things. How many pages did you actually sample? Which of your fixes are global? And which win are you taking to the dev team first? Hear the whole conversation on Unscripted SEO, and connect with Erika Braeger on LinkedIn.