How Crawl Waste Cleanup Supercharged AI Search Visibility by 10% – Despite a Tiny ChatGPT Dip!

Crawl waste is one of the most insidious SEO pitfalls. It involves cluttering your crawlable content with tons of non-indexed pages.

We know this because we do it all the time for my agency’s clients. Reducing the number of non-indexed pages is a factor in improving rankings. Highlighting richer, authoritative content improves visibility in traditional SERP listings.

But how does it impact AI search visibility? And were the results different by platform? 

Thanks to some recent cleanup and data-crunching, we’ve got some directional answers. We used Profound to measure changes in AI search visibility for a client in the childcare vertical. I’ll lay out these takeaways in this article. 

Yes, it’s just one website. AI is moving at light speed. Having promising results that need further validation is a valuable first step.

Crawl Waste Cleanup: The Shocking Truth Behind Our Actions

Sitemaps should only feature canonical versions of pages that a brand wants indexed in search results.

The childcare client’s site had 2,000 indexed pages. It also had ~45,000 pages that were not being indexed. This included 4,000 duplicate and redirected URLs incorrectly listed in the sitemap. (A sitemap should only contain canonical URLs you want Google to find and index.) 

The site also contained low-quality directory listings, all of which pointed to poor health.

We optimized the sitemap. We improved the indexing strategy. We achieved this by reducing the number of duplicate and redirected URLs in the sitemap. The number decreased from more than 4,000 to fewer than 200. 

This cleanup improved crawl efficiency, helping search engines and AI systems focus on the client’s high-quality, intent-aligned content.