Erika Braeger: If Machines Can't Read It, You Won't Show Up

Erika Braeger, Director of Strategy at Ten Speed, is back on Unscripted SEO with a blunt answer to the question of what matters most in SEO right now: machine readability. If a machine can't easily parse and understand your site, it gets much harder to show up in AI Overviews, AI Mode, organic search and LLM search. For Erika, that starts with technical SEO.

Erika and Jeremy Rivera dig into the two pitfalls she runs into most - page speed that clients keep kicking down the road, and tech debt that balloons when URLs change without redirects. One client sunset a blog without redirecting it, and because it was linked all over the site it created a pile of 4xx errors. If you missed Erika's first episode, start there. Read the full recap of this one.

In this episode

• Competitor page-speed comparisons against the two or three sites that pulled ahead, and the usual slowdowns: images sized wrong, third-party JavaScript firing before user-facing content, and autoplaying video. Ten Speed's list of common technical SEO issues and how to fix them covers more.
• Lazy loading only below the fold - a lazy-loaded hero image scrambles things.
• Two megabytes or less, ideally a lot less, and a replace, modify or remove decision tree for whatever is inflating the page.
• Redirect debt from sunset and updated URLs, and how to properly redirect pages with 301 redirects.
• Enterprise buy-in: ship the big global fixes first, then take each win to every team it touched. One client is cleaning up two years of tech debt in 90 days.
• Claude as a second set of eyes on chunks of a Screaming Frog crawl, and for charts clients can actually read.
• EEAT and schema for LLM visibility: real customer stories, and review schema that connects your site to G2 and Trustpilot. See Ten Speed's 12-week generative engine optimization rollout plan and its research on what AI cites for B2B evaluation-stage prompts.
• Backlinks and AI visibility: Jeremy walks through Ben Wills' AI ranking factor research, and Erika ties it to showing up the same way across the web.

Chapters

• (00:00) Erika's intro: Director of Strategy at Ten Speed
• (00:39) Machine readability, the most consequential facet of SEO
• (01:46) The top pitfalls: page speed and URL tech debt
• (03:34) Proving page speed matters: competitor comparisons and the Walmart study
• (07:26) Images, third-party JavaScript, video and lazy loading
• (10:28) Page weight and the two-megabyte line
• (11:58) PDFs and bottom-of-funnel content
• (13:02) Two years of tech debt in 90 days
• (13:55) Winning enterprise buy-in with global fixes first
• (15:35) Claude, Screaming Frog crawls and the future of SEO SaaS
• (20:03) Lower barriers and the learning-curve worry
• (24:01) EEAT and schema for LLM visibility
• (26:48) Ben Wills' research on backlinks and AI visibility
• (30:17) Telling a consistent story across the web
• (32:26) Key takeaway: sample page speed across your site
• (33:11) Where to find Erika and Ten Speed

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