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Salesforce SEO

Makes Salesforce-hosted pages easier for search engines and AI crawlers to crawl, index, and understand through technical and content practices.

If you have ever treated Salesforce as an SEO tool rather than a platform with configuration options, you already know the settings matter more than the product name.

Key points

  • Set one primary h1 per page and keep heading hierarchy logical.
  • Use JSON-LD structured data for Product, Offer, and AggregateRating.
  • Submit or refresh sitemaps manually; automatic partial refreshes happen every 24 hours.
  • Make Experience Cloud sites public, activated, and published before SEO changes go live.
  • Check guest-user field access — it affects what appears in the sitemap and what crawlers can reach.

A product page blocked by robots.txt

A B2C Commerce site launched a new product category with 200 items. The SEO team set up canonical URLs and JSON-LD for each product, but forgot to update robots.txt to allow crawling of the new directory. After three weeks, none of the pages appeared in search. A quick check of the robots.txt file revealed the block; once removed, Google indexed 180 of the 200 pages within a week. The missing 20 had guest-user access restricted, which also blocked the sitemap from including them.

Three ways it goes wrong

  • Blocked by robots.txt You set a directive that stops crawlers from reaching important pages. Check the file before assuming a page is indexable.
  • Duplicate URLs without canonicals Salesforce can generate multiple URLs for the same product. Without a canonical tag, search engines may split ranking signals across duplicates.
  • Instant-change assumption Sitemap and content changes are not instant. Salesforce refreshes partial sitemaps every 24 hours, and snapshots take time to process.

Three settings to check before launch

  • Public site status Experience Cloud sites must be public, activated, and published before SEO changes are live. A draft site is invisible to crawlers.
  • Guest-user field access Fields hidden from guest users may not appear in the sitemap, limiting what search engines can see and index.
  • URL slugs and structure Use clean, descriptive URL slugs. Salesforce Commerce SEO guidance recommends avoiding duplicate or poorly structured paths, as they waste crawl budget and confuse AI search seo systems.

Common questions

What is AI SEO?

AI SEO uses artificial intelligence to plan, create, and optimise content for both traditional search and AI-powered search experiences.

How does Salesforce SEO relate to AI search?

Salesforce now explicitly includes AI crawlers and generative engine optimisation in its guidance, so older checklists may miss current requirements.

What is the difference between GEO and SEO?

GEO (generative engine optimisation) focuses on making content discoverable by AI answer engines, while SEO targets traditional search results.

Sources

  1. Salesforce Help: SEO & Discoverability for B2C Commerce Covers B2C Commerce SEO features including canonicals, sitemaps, and structured data.
  2. Salesforce Help: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for B2B Commerce Details B2B Commerce SEO configuration for meta tags, robots.txt, and sitemaps.
  3. Salesforce Help: Set Up Your Experience Builder Site for SEO Explains public site requirements and guest-user access for Experience Cloud SEO.
  4. Salesforce Marketing: The Future of SEO Discusses AI crawlers and generative engine optimisation in Salesforce SEO guidance.
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