# Googlebot passthrough and SEO safety — ADN — ADN

← Back to Learn Making your site agent-friendly must never come at the cost of search rankings. That is why ADN has one non-negotiable rule:
 > Googlebot and social unfurlers always receive untouched passthrough.
 Why this matters
 Many "agent-friendly" proposals suggest serving Markdown or simplified HTML to all bots. That is dangerous for SEO:
 • Googlebot expects your canonical HTML. Substituting Markdown can cause indexing mismatches.
 • Social unfurlers (facebookexternalhit, Slackbot, Twitterbot) parse OG tags from your real HTML. Serving a different shape breaks previews.
 • Procurement teams rightly ask: "Will this hurt our rankings?" The answer must be an unqualified no.
 How ADN enforces it
 Machine traffic is classified before your origin is touched. The legacy_seo_social class includes:
 • Googlebot (all variants)
 • facebookexternalhit
 • Slackbot, Twitterbot, LinkedInBot
 • Other search and social preview crawlers
 These requests are proxied to your origin and returned unchanged. No Markdown substitution. No content stripping. No caching layer that alters the response body.
 What other classes receive
 Agent-friendly optimization targets different visitors:
 • answer_engine — Clean Markdown + JSON-LD for AI answer indexers
 • bulk_training — Corpus export on agreed terms
 • developer_agent — MCP tools and llms.txt for IDE agents
 • live_fetch — Fast Markdown for user-triggered chat fetches
 Each class gets the shape its job needs. Search engines get exactly what you published.
 Verifying in production
 After connecting a domain, open Analytics in the ADN dashboard. Filter by class legacy_seo_social . Every row should show response shape passthrough . If it does not, that is a bug — not a feature.
 SEO + GEO together
 Traditional SEO and generative engine optimization are complementary:
 • SEO — Googlebot sees your real HTML. Rankings and snippets stay under your control.
 • GEO — Answer engines and agents get structured content they can quote without burning tokens on markup noise.
 ADN routes both from the same gateway. The classifier decides; your origin stays authoritative for search.
 Frequently asked
 Will ADN change what Googlebot sees? No. Googlebot is classified as legacy_seo_social and always receives your origin response unchanged. ADN never rewrites, compresses, or substitutes Markdown for search crawlers.
 What about Bingbot and other search engines? Answer-engine indexers like Bingbot may receive Markdown when classified as answer_engine — because they consume content for AI answers, not traditional ranking. Googlebot and social unfurlers are always passthrough.
 Can I audit passthrough in production? Yes. Analytics reports total traffic and high-confidence machine traffic, with formats served to each. Request log rows for Googlebot show passthrough HTML.
 Continue reading
 Nine intent classes explained
 Agent-friendly vs agent-ready: why we don't sell a score
 Run the free scan on your URL to see what AI receives today.
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