Does your server respond fast enough for AI crawlers to wait for it?
AI crawlers give up sooner than Google; a slow first byte means your content is silently skipped.
What this signal tests
We measure two timings from a cold request, with no warmed cache. First, Time to First Byte (TTFB), the gap between sending a request and receiving the first byte of the response. Second, the total time to receive the full HTML document. Both must finish within a tight budget that AI crawlers consider acceptable.
Why it matters for your visibility in AI
AI crawlers like GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot operate under tight per-request timeouts, typically five to ten seconds, much shorter than Googlebot's tolerance. If your site takes eight seconds to respond, ChatGPT's user-fetch crawler may give up and your content simply will not appear in answers, even though Google still indexes the same page. This creates an invisible gap. You may rank well in traditional search yet be entirely absent from AI assistants. The penalty compounds at scale: a slow origin lets the crawler fetch fewer pages per visit, so deep pages get crawled less often or never, and your knowledge graph footprint in AI corpora steadily shrinks.
Pass criteria at a glance
| Criterion | Passes when |
|---|---|
| Median TTFB <=800ms AND median full document <=2500ms. |
How we test it
We send three cold requests to your homepage from a probe outside your origin region, with no shared cache between attempts. We record the time until the first byte arrives and the time until the full HTML document finishes downloading, then take the median of the three. If Chrome User Experience Report data is available for your domain, we also accept that real-user p75 figure as a parallel data source.
Show technical detection method
Measure TTFB and total time over 3 cold requests from multi-region prober (no warm cache); use median. Also accept CrUX field data (experimental_time_to_first_byte p75).
If your site fails: how to fix it
- Put your site behind a content delivery network such as Cloudflare, Vercel, Fastly, or AWS CloudFront. A CDN serves your HTML from a server near the visitor or crawler, which usually cuts TTFB to under 200 milliseconds.
- Cache your rendered HTML at the edge for anonymous traffic. Most slow sites are slow because they regenerate the same page on every request - caching turns it into a static file lookup.
- Enable HTTP/2 or HTTP/3 on your origin or CDN. Both protocols let crawlers fetch multiple resources over a single connection, reducing total page time.
- Reduce origin work on the critical path: remove blocking database queries, defer analytics scripts to async, and pre-render dynamic content where possible.
- Re-run the AI Ready Test from a region far from your origin to confirm the global median has dropped below the budget.
Quick facts
| Maturity | ESTABLISHED |
|---|---|
| Weight | high |
| Category | Performance |
Primary sources
Related signals
Frequently asked questions
How fast does my site need to be?
Aim for a median Time to First Byte under 800 milliseconds and a full document under 2.5 seconds, measured cold from a crawler-like region. That gives AI fetchers comfortable headroom inside their typical 5 to 10 second timeout.
Will fixing this also improve my Google ranking?
Yes. TTFB is a documented input into Google's Core Web Vitals through Largest Contentful Paint, and a fast server improves both AI crawl success and traditional search performance. The two goals point in the same direction.
Do I need a CDN?
For almost all public sites, yes. Without a CDN, every request hits a single origin region, and visitors or crawlers on other continents pay round-trip latency. Cloudflare and Vercel offer free tiers that resolve this in an afternoon.
What if my site is fast for me but slow for the test?
You are probably benefiting from a warm browser cache or geographic proximity to the origin. Crawlers see cold cache from arbitrary regions. Test from a clean browser session or a tool like WebPageTest from a distant location to reproduce the crawler experience.
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