Indirectly. Slow pages risk crawler timeouts, which means content may never be retrieved at all. But speed is not a ranking factor within AI answer selection the way it is in traditional search — render integrity matters far more than milliseconds.
The critical question is whether your content exists in the delivered HTML without JavaScript execution.
Test by disabling JavaScript and reloading. Anything that disappears may be invisible to retrieval.
Fix render integrity before optimising load time.