Speed up your page for AI retrieval
Your page took too long to respond when we fetched it. That costs you AI visibility for a simple reason: retrieval systems fetching sources at answer time are lazy and impatient by design. Tokens are expensive, users are waiting, and a slow source gets skipped in favor of a faster one saying roughly the same thing.
Why do AI systems care about speed?
Because they’re assembling an answer right now. When an assistant runs its searches and picks pages to read, it deals with two things: what it holds in memory and what it can fetch quickly. A page that takes five seconds to respond doesn’t get five seconds of patience - it gets dropped from the candidate pool. Speed isn’t a ranking bonus here; it’s admission.
What should you fix first?
Attack server response time before anything else - this check measures how fast your HTML arrives, not how fast your images load:
- Caching. Full-page caching (or a static/pre-rendered setup) turns multi-second dynamic renders into sub-second responses. On WordPress, a page-cache plugin is the single biggest win.
- Hosting. If your time-to-first-byte is slow even with caching, the server itself is underpowered or overloaded - upgrade or move.
- A CDN puts copies near the requester - just make sure its bot settings aren’t blocking AI crawlers while it speeds you up.
- Cut redirect chains. Every extra hop (http → https → www → final page) adds delay to every fetch.
How fast is fast enough?
The scanner passes responses arriving within about two seconds and flags anything past that; over four and a half seconds is a fail. Well-configured sites routinely respond in under one second. Fix the caching layer, rescan, and this check usually flips on the first try.
See where your site stands. The free scan takes about fifteen seconds and shows every fix.
Run a free AI visibility scan