Time to First Byte
The interval between a navigation request starting and the first byte of the response arriving; a foundational input to LCP and a signal…
TechnicalCDN
Content Delivery Network
A distributed network of edge servers that caches and serves content close to users, reducing latency and offloading the origin.
In full
For SEO the benefits are lower TTFB and higher crawl capacity, plus image optimisation and modern protocol support at the edge. The risks are cache misconfiguration serving stale or wrong-locale content, edge rules that block crawler user agents, and geo-routing that shows crawlers a different country's content. Bot management rules that challenge unknown agents can also silently block legitimate AI crawlers a publisher wants to allow.
Example
A bot-protection rule starts returning 403 to ClaudeBot and GPTBot, cutting off the site's citations in AI assistants until it is allowlisted.
Related terms
Cache-Control
The HTTP header governing how browsers, CDNs and proxies store and revalidate a response, using directives such as max-age, s-maxage and…
Edge SEO
Implementing SEO changes in CDN edge workers rather than the origin application, so fixes ship without touching the main codebase or…
ClaudeBot
Anthropic's family of web crawlers and fetchers, including a general crawler and agents that retrieve pages for search results and for…
GPTBot
OpenAI's crawler used to collect publicly available web content that may be used to improve future models; controllable via robots.txt.