The Side Effects of Caching
To speed up load times, most factory websites use caching—Cloudflare, server plugins, or CDNs. Visitors see the cached version instantly.
But AI crawlers also receive the cached version. If you updated your product specs last week, but the cache hasn’t cleared, AI reads the old data. Worse, misconfigured caching might serve the crawler a broken mobile version or an empty unrendered shell.
Why Response Headers Matter
Response headers are instructions your server sends before delivering content. They dictate when content expires, if it can be cached, and its format.
Most factory websites use default settings from their web agency. Sometimes, headers tell AI crawlers to cache a page for a year. Even if you update the content ten times, AI search results will display the year-old version.
How to Check Your Cache Settings
Open your browser’s developer tools, load your core page, and inspect the Cache-Control and Age values in the Response Headers. If max-age is set to a massive number (like 31,536,000 seconds), your updates are being ignored.
Alternatively, search your product page title on Google. If the snippet shows old content, the search engine is still pulling from a stale cache.