The Technical SEO Checklist I Actually Use for Every Audit

The short answer

A technical SEO audit checks, in order: whether search engines can crawl your site, whether they can index what they crawl, whether the page loads fast enough to keep users and pass Core Web Vitals, whether structured data removes ambiguity about what the content is, and whether internal linking actually reflects what matters most on the site. Skipping the order matters — content and design fixes are wasted effort if a page isn't crawlable in the first place.

1. Crawlability

Before anything else, I check whether search engines (and increasingly, AI crawlers) can actually reach the pages that matter.

• robots.txt — confirm it isn't accidentally blocking important sections. I've seen entire blogs disallowed by a leftover staging-environment rule.
• XML sitemap — present, submitted in Search Console, and free of 404s or redirected URLs. A sitemap full of dead links wastes crawl budget and signals a poorly maintained site.
• Crawl budget — for larger sites, check Search Console's crawl stats report for wasted crawling on parameter URLs, duplicate content, or infinite pagination. I wrote up a real example of this in the AI crawler behavior analysis.
• Redirect chains — a redirect that hops through 3+ URLs before landing wastes crawl budget and dilutes link equity at each hop.
• JavaScript rendering — if content depends on client-side JavaScript, confirm it's actually present in the rendered HTML search engines see, not just what a human sees in a browser.

2. Indexability

Being crawlable doesn't guarantee being indexed. This is where I check for self-inflicted wounds.

• Meta robots and canonical tags — confirm important pages don't have accidental noindex tags or canonical tags pointing to the wrong URL. This happens more often than it should, usually after a migration.
• Duplicate content and cannibalization — multiple pages targeting the same query split ranking signals instead of combining them. I check Search Console for pages competing against each other for the same terms.
• Thin or auto-generated pages — pages with too little unique content get excluded from the index over time. This is especially common on faceted navigation and programmatic SEO builds.
• Index coverage report — I go through every "Excluded" reason in Search Console line by line rather than assuming they're all fine.

3. Core Web Vitals and page speed

This is the category most people think of first when they hear "technical SEO," but on most audits I run, it isn't the highest-impact fix — crawlability and indexation problems usually are. Still, it matters:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) — usually a hero image or font-loading issue. Check whether critical resources are render-blocking.
• Interaction to Next Paint (INP) — heavy JavaScript execution on interaction, often third-party scripts (chat widgets, ad tech, analytics) rather than the site's own code.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) — images and ads without reserved dimensions are the usual culprit.
• Mobile vs desktop — check both separately; a site can pass on desktop and fail badly on mobile, which is what Google actually indexes against by default.

4. Structured data and schema

Structured data doesn't directly boost rankings, but it removes ambiguity — for Google's rich results and, increasingly, for how AI engines parse what a page is actually about.

• Organization/Person schema — confirms who's behind the content, relevant to both Google's trust signals and AI engines trying to attribute a source.
• Article/BlogPosting schema — on content pages, with correct author, date, and headline fields.
• FAQPage schema — where there's genuine FAQ content. I tested whether this actually moves AI citation rates in a dedicated experiment — worth reading before assuming schema alone will fix a citation problem.
• BreadcrumbList schema — helps both search engines and users understand site hierarchy, and often produces breadcrumb rich results in Google.

5. Site architecture and internal linking

This is the most consistently underused lever I see on real sites — and it's free.

• Click depth — important pages shouldn't be buried more than 3–4 clicks from the homepage. I map this out rather than assuming.
• Internal link distribution — check whether your most important pages actually receive the most internal links, or whether that's happened by accident based on when pages were created.
• Orphan pages — pages with zero internal links pointing to them are nearly invisible to crawlers regardless of their own quality.
• Anchor text variety — natural, descriptive anchor text helps both users and search engines understand what the linked page is about, without it reading like keyword stuffing.

6. The check most audits skip: AI crawler access

This is the addition I make to every audit now that didn't exist a few years ago. A technically sound site for Google can still be invisible to AI engines if this gets missed.

• Confirm AI crawlers aren't blocked — check robots.txt for GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, and Google-Extended specifically. Some sites block these by default through a CDN security setting without realizing it.
• Server-side rendering for critical content — AI crawlers are generally less sophisticated at executing JavaScript than Googlebot is. Content that depends on client-side rendering is a bigger risk here than for classic SEO.
• Direct-answer structure — beyond crawlability, check whether your most important pages actually answer a specific question clearly near the top, which affects citation likelihood independent of ranking position, as I found in the AI Overview citation study.

How I prioritize what I find

Not everything on this list carries equal weight. I generally prioritize in this order: crawlability and indexation issues first, since nothing else matters if pages aren't reachable; then Core Web Vitals failures affecting a large share of traffic; then structured data and internal linking, since these compound over time rather than fixing anything overnight. AI crawler access gets checked alongside crawlability, not as an afterthought, since the underlying problem (something blocking a crawler) is usually the same root cause either way.

References

1. AI Features and Your Website — Google Search Central. Referenced for how Google's AI Overviews source and select content.