Content is Everything
Pillar 3 of 6

Technical discoverability

Lindsay Smith · Last reviewed 2026-08

Everything in this pillar is a precondition rather than a strategy. A technically sound site earns no citations by itself. A technically broken one is excluded before the contest begins, and the owner rarely finds out. This is the plumbing: unglamorous, checkable, and most of it can run without you.

  • Retrievability is binary and silent. A blocked crawler, a firewall rule, or content that only exists after JavaScript runs: each excludes you without an error message you will ever see. Required
  • One canonical URL per thing. Split versions split your standing. Official recommendation
  • Text is the retrievable form. Facts locked in images or interactive widgets are facts a retrieval system may never see. Official recommendation
  • This layer belongs to your platform. None of it needs the owner's judgement, so hosting platforms handle it most fully, bernard included. Context-dependent

In this pillar

What bernard does about this pillar

This is bernard's home ground: hosted sites get static HTML, managed robots and sitemaps, canonical URLs and structured-data validation as standard. verified

Standing audits for redirect chains and status-code drift are partial today; the gap is tracked openly. partial

In the folklore ledger

Each verdict carries its primary source and the date we last checked it. See the full ledger.

made with bernard

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