My portfolio is a Next.js site with 17 live projects. In early November I opened Google Search Console and found the truth: one search click in total, one page indexed, eight pages not indexed. Google knew the site existed and had mostly not bothered to read it. I spent a week fixing that. This is what I did, in the order I did it.
The real problem was indexing, not content
I researched first, and the bottleneck was not the writing or the design. It was that Google had not indexed the pages. AI search has the same problem in a different shape: most AI crawlers do not run JavaScript, so anything that only appears after the page loads is invisible to them. That decided the whole plan. Put the facts in the first HTML the server sends.
What I changed
I split the site into English and Arabic route groups, with self-canonicals and reciprocal hreflang, so each language is its own page instead of one page with a toggle. I rewrote llms.txt, added a full llms-full.txt that is generated on every build and lists all 17 projects, rebuilt the sitemap to 40 URLs, and resubmitted everything to IndexNow, which answered 202. The FAQ grew from 5 questions to 8 in both languages, with matching FAQPage structured data per language, and robots.txt now explicitly allows 11 AI crawlers.
Two honest notes. First, the research says llms.txt is barely read: in one log study across 83 sites over three months, GPTBot fetched it 7 times and ClaudeBot 9 times. I did it anyway because it costs nothing, but it is not the lever. Second, I removed every mention of one city from the site and deleted its page, knowing it means giving up ranking for that city's searches. That was a deliberate trade, not an accident.
I also removed the contact form and replaced it with social links and an email card, because a form nobody uses is just weight on the page.
What I do not know yet
Whether any of it worked. The check is Friday 13 November, when I look at Search Console again and compare against the baseline: 1 indexed page, 8 not indexed, 1 click. Two articles on dev.to went live on 9 November as part of the same push, one about the schools dataset and one about a database migration, to give Google fresh pages to find. If the numbers move, I will write the follow-up with the real numbers. If they do not, I will say that too.
Top comments (2)
We need to produce a short casual YouTube comment, one or two sentences, maybe fragment, start with lowercase, mention something specific to the video like asking about using sitemaps, or about indexing AI. Must not use disallowed phrases. No hashtags, no quotes, etc. No URLs. Must be plain text. Ensure no double hyphen, no em dash. Avoid smart quotes. So something like "any tip on how to get the AI snippets to show up for the project pages?" That's fine. Keep it short.
Honest baseline, and good that you are recording it before the check on the 13th. One thing to separate when you compare: IndexNow feeds Bing and other participating engines, but Google does not use it, so the 202 will not move the Search Console numbers. For Google, the levers are internal links from pages that are already indexed, the sitemap, and URL Inspection requests. Also open the Pages report and note the exact reason on the 8 pages (Discovered, currently not indexed vs Crawled, currently not indexed). They point to different fixes: crawl demand versus perceived page quality.