In February 2026, the foreign trade industry has fully entered the era of AI decision-making and procurement. A large number of traditional independent websites built 3-5 years ago are falling asleep: the website is still there, the products are still there, but the traffic is getting less and less. Even if advertising is invested, the quality of inquiries continues to decline. The fundamental reason is that the old website architecture, content, and structure do not comply with the AI ​​recognition rules at all, and cannot enter the recommendation system of ChatGPT. Many bosses think that they have to redo their website. In fact, by renovating the old GEO site, they can make the old site read, crawled and recommended by AI again at a lower cost and in a shorter time. This article uses the most practical renovation steps to help you transform your dormant old website into an AI-friendly customer acquisition site.

Traditional old foreign trade websites are mostly designed for search engine SEO and human browsing. They have natural flaws in the AI era, which directly lead to their inability to be recognized and recommended.

Four fatal problems common in old websites All the information is hidden in the picture Product parameters, certifications, models, delivery dates, and MOQ are all displayed using images. AI cannot read the text content and can only determine that the site information is missing. According to OpenAI’s official GPTBot instructions in February 2026, pure image content will be directly skipped by AI (https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/gptbot).

The site structure is confusing and the hierarchy is too deep Old sites generally use multi-layer nested navigation, with products hidden behind 4-5 layers of pages, making it difficult for AI crawlers to crawl in depth. Sites with a chaotic structure have a 67% lower probability of being fully included than sites with a clear structure (https://pagespeed.web.dev).

The content is unstructured and the expression is inconsistent The same product has different names on different pages, the qualifications and services are unclear, and AI cannot establish a stable understanding of the business entity, so it will naturally not recommend you to buyers.

Slow loading and poor mobile experience Old sites have outdated technology, bloated code, uncompressed images, and overseas opening speeds often exceed 5 seconds. However, AI gives priority to recommending sites that are fast, stable, and globally accessible. Stuttering sites will directly reduce their weight (https://cloud.tencent.com/developer/article/2622378).

These problems are not operational problems, but rather the underlying architecture is not suitable for GEO and must be reactivated through a systematic renovation.

The primary goal of renovating the old site is to enable AI to read the entire site content without any barriers, stably, and completely, which is the basis for all GEO optimization.

Open AI crawling permissions Check and ensure that the site does not block AI crawlers such as GPTBot, cancel unnecessary login walls, verification codes, and pop-up window blocking, so that AI can freely crawl page content. This is a recommended prerequisite.

Speed optimization to ensure stable overseas access Compress images, streamline code, enable static caching, and use global acceleration to control the opening speed of the target market within 2 seconds. It can be detected and optimized one by one through official tools (https://pagespeed.web.dev).

Clean up dead links, error pages, and redundant content Delete pages that have not been updated for a long time, have no value, and are repeatedly accumulated, and repair invalid links to make the AI crawler path cleaner and the crawling efficiency higher. Actual measurement data in 2026 shows that the site crawling rate increased by 58% after cleaning.

Flat structure transformation Change the deep directory to a flat structure, with direct access to products, cases, qualifications, and services from the homepage, reducing the number of clicks and allowing AI to fully understand your business scope and advantages in a short time.

This is the core and fastest step in renovating the old site. The purpose is to turn messy content into standardized information that can be recognized by AI.

Convert image information to text information Extract all product parameters, certifications, qualifications, and service commitments from the images and re-display them using plain text to ensure that key information such as MOQ, delivery date, material, certification, model, and usage can be read by AI.

Unify the business description of the entire site Unify the company name, brand, product name, service name, and target market, avoid multiple names for the same content, and allow AI to establish a stable and consistent business understanding.

Reconstruct four major types of structured data Product structured information: name, purpose, material, size, MOQ, delivery date, port, certification, advantage label. Company qualification information: CE, FDA, ISO, ROHS, etc., with official searchable links (https://ec.europa.eu/growth/single-market/european-standards/ce-marking_en). Service structured information: customization, OEM, after-sales, proofing, logistics, customs clearance, with clear processes and clear commitments. Customer case structured information: country, industry, needs, solutions, results, allowing AI to extract real trust signals.

After the structured data is completed, the AI recognition accuracy can be increased from less than 30% to more than 90% (https://www.ahrefs.com/blog/2026-foreign-trade-ai-lead-trend/).

The core principles of AI recommendations are trustworthiness, verifiability, and traceability. Old sites generally lack trust signals and must make up for them.

Verifiable qualifications All certifications add official query entrances, which are not fictitious or exaggerated, so that AI can be cross-checked, which is the most important weight basis for B2B recommendations.

Supplementary real customer cases Publish real cases with countries, needs, plans, and results. The more specific the case, the higher the trust in AI and the greater the probability of recommendation.

Content changed from “keyword stuffing” to “AI citable knowledge” Delete low-quality SEO copywriting and replace it with content that buyers really care about, such as compliance requirements, selection guides, cost optimization, delivery plans, etc., so that AI will think your site has professional reference value (https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/marketing-and-sales/our-insights).

Enterprise information integrity Improve the address, phone number, email, and social account, keep the information consistent across the entire network, and help AI build a true and reliable corporate portrait.

Related article recommendations: Your peers have not yet reacted: using GEO to build an independent foreign trade station is the biggest blue ocean strategy at the moment

In the AI foreign trade era of 2026, a large number of old websites are not useless, but have not been correctly transformed. As long as the crawling channel repair, structural reconstruction, content standardization, and trust system completion are completed in accordance with GEO rules, old websites can also be identified and recommended by ChatGPT and bring continuous inquiries.

GEO renovation is cheaper and more effective than redoing a website. It is the most cost-effective upgrade method for foreign trade companies.

If your old site has an old structure, bloated code, and difficult transformation, or you want to have a naturally AI-friendly site in one step, Pindian Technology can provide you with a more thorough solution. Pindian Technology has more than ten years of experience in building foreign trade websites and has served more than 7,000 customers in total. It adopts React technology architecture, with smooth and smooth pages, extremely fast loading, and a structure that is naturally adapted to GEO optimization. It supports a full set of capabilities such as structured data, AI crawling, qualified external links, and global acceleration, so that your independent website meets AI recommended standards from the bottom up.

Whether it is a GEO renovation of an old site or a new AI customer acquisition site, Pindian Technology can help you quickly implement it, make the dormant site visible to AI again, and let overseas buyers take the initiative to find you through ChatGPT.