By Zach Wennstedt, founder of Eye To Ad Media · 2026-09-29
A technical SEO audit checks whether search engines and AI systems can crawl, render, index and understand a site. The core areas are crawlability, indexing, rendering, site architecture and internal links, page speed and Core Web Vitals, structured data, and AI readiness, including robots rules for AI crawlers and an llms.txt file.
An audit is only useful if it ends in fixes. So this checklist is ordered by money: the problems at the top can remove pages from Google entirely, and the ones at the bottom polish pages that are already visible.
1. Crawlability
- robots.txt: nothing important blocked; AI crawlers treated on purpose. Check yours with our AI crawler checker.
- Server responses: key pages return 200, no soft 404s, no 5xx spikes in logs.
- Redirects: no chains longer than one hop, no loops, no 302s that should be 301s.
- XML sitemap: only canonical, indexable 200 URLs; submitted in Search Console.
2. Indexing
- Search Console coverage: pages you care about are indexed; excluded pages are excluded on purpose.
- Canonicals: self-referencing on originals, consistent with sitemaps and internal links.
- noindex: only on pages that should stay out; never on money pages.
- Duplicates: parameters, trailing slashes, HTTP versus HTTPS and www versus apex resolved.
3. Rendering
- Main content, links and metadata present in the initial HTML, not only after JavaScript. See JavaScript SEO.
- No critical content behind clicks, tabs that never load or infinite scroll without pagination.
4. Architecture and internal links
- Money pages within three clicks of the home page.
- No orphan pages. Our internal link graph finds them visually.
- Descriptive anchor text, not "click here."
5. Speed and Core Web Vitals
- LCP under 2.5 seconds, INP under 200 milliseconds, CLS under 0.1 for most real visits.
- Images sized and compressed; fonts loaded without blocking; third-party scripts justified. Read how to fix INP.
6. Structured data
- Valid JSON-LD that matches visible content; entities connected with @id. Test it with our schema validator.
- Organization, LocalBusiness or Service, BreadcrumbList and FAQPage where they genuinely apply.
7. AI readiness
- Clear, quotable answers near the top of key pages.
- An llms.txt file describing the site. Generate one with our llms.txt generator.
- Forms and buttons labeled so AI agents can use them. See agent-ready forms.
Want it done for you, with the fixes written in code? That is our SEO audit service.