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Technical SEO audit

A technical SEO audit checks the layer below content: whether search engines and AI engines can find, read and trust your pages at all. Google's documentation defines one piece of that map: "A sitemap is a file where you provide information about the pages, videos, and other files on your site, and the relationships between them." We test that file plus robots.txt, indexability, rendering and more, 164 graded checks in total, gate failures first.

If a page cannot be crawled, nothing else matters. Gate failures block your score until they are fixed, because that is how the engines treat them too.

Free Visibility Scan: whole site, up to 150 pages, no email. Full Report is a one-time $10.

What technical SEO covers in 2026

The original scope, plus three additions that now matter.

Addition 1

AI crawler access

Google-Extended, GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and OAI-SearchBot are separate crawlers with their own robots.txt directives. Many sites block them unintentionally through wildcard Disallow rules that were never meant to apply. We check each bot individually. See fixing robots.txt AI blocks.

Addition 2

Structured data completeness

JSON-LD is now a precondition for AI citation eligibility, not just a nice-to-have for rich results. We validate your schema objects against the declared types, check for required properties and score answer-block readiness.

Addition 3

JavaScript rendering dependency

If your content only appears after JavaScript executes, crawlers may see an empty page. "Renders without JavaScript" is a scored Gate check. A fail here is a diagnosis, not a suggestion. See fixing JavaScript rendering.

What we check in the technical layer

Four tiers, in the order the engines care.

Gate tier (these block everything if they fail)

  • Googlebot crawlability via robots.txt path analysis
  • AI bot access: individual checks for GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and OAI-SearchBot, plus the full 15-bot matrix. See fixing AI crawler access
  • Indexability: noindex detection in HTTP headers and meta tags
  • JavaScript render dependency: does the content exist in the raw HTML?
  • Sitemap presence and reachability; bot reachability at the HTTP level

Core tier (scored baseline signals)

  • Structured data (JSON-LD): presence, type detection and required-property completeness
  • Mixed content: an HTTPS page loading HTTP assets
  • Mobile parity: whether the mobile version matches desktop content
  • Content depth: enough substance to be worth indexing

Amplifier tier (technical signals with ranking lift)

  • Snippet eligibility: nosnippet and max-snippet directives that suppress AI Overviews and featured snippets
  • Canonical tag correctness
  • llms.txt presence and validity
  • Passage structure: answer passages formatted for AI extraction

Hygiene tier (technical clean-up)

  • HTTPS enforcement, redirect chain length and loops, soft-404 detection
  • Image alt attributes, image dimensions, viewport meta tag, HTML lang attribute, IndexNow support, page weight
  • The HTML-source signals behind Core Web Vitals, with real Chrome field data shown when it is available
  • Security response headers (HSTS, X-Content-Type-Options, Referrer-Policy, CSP), graded in the 48-check Vibe Audit

Every check cites the official documentation it is grounded in. The reasoning is public in the learn library.

What you get

The problems, before you pay anything.

Visibility Scan (free): the full technical audit of your whole site, up to 150 pages. Every Gate, Core, Amplifier and Hygiene finding named, worst first, with verdicts and explanations.

Full Report ($10, once): every finding unsealed with the exact page, element and fix, plus a PDF report, a prioritized action plan and an AI-ready fix file. Need a corrected robots.txt or an llms.txt right now? Our free robots.txt generator and llms.txt generator are open to everyone.

Monitor ($29/month): weekly technical health scans that catch regressions before they cost you rankings. Full terms on the pricing page.

Questions

Straight answers.

How is a technical SEO audit different from a standard SEO audit?

Technical SEO covers the infrastructure layer: can search engines and AI engines access and parse your pages at all? Content-level signals sit on top of this. If your technical layer is broken, content improvements will not save your rankings. Technical SEO is the prerequisite. The broader scans live at the SEO audit tool and website audit tool pages.

What is a Gate failure?

A Gate failure means a critical technical issue exists that blocks meaningful scoring of the rest of your site. It gates everything below it: there is no point optimizing title tags if Googlebot cannot reach the page. Gate failures are shown first, explained in plain English, with an effort estimate.

Do you check Core Web Vitals?

We check the HTML-source signals that shape Core Web Vitals on every scan. When real Chrome field data (CrUX) is available for your site, the report shows it; when a URL has no field data, we say so plainly rather than substituting a guess. The full breakdown lives on the Core Web Vitals page.

Can you check AI bot access for all the major crawlers?

Yes. We check Googlebot, Bingbot and the major AI crawlers individually against your robots.txt, and we run a full 15-bot matrix that shows exactly which crawlers are permitted and which are blocked. The AI crawler optimization page goes deeper, and the AI search optimization hub covers the whole AI layer.

Find the failure that gates everything else.

Free scan of your whole site, up to 150 pages. Gate-tier findings first. No email.

164 graded checks · gate failures first · results in about a minute