Technical SEO Audit

Technical SEO audits built for search, AI, and the agents coming next.

We inspect how search engines, AI-powered search systems, and browser agents access, render, understand, and navigate your site, then turn the findings into a prioritized implementation roadmap your engineers can actually ship.

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Your website can look perfect and still be hard to discover.

Four failure patterns account for almost every invisible technical problem we find.

Crawlers can't reach it

Robots rules, canonicals, status codes, architecture, or infrastructure quietly block discovery.

Search engines can't interpret it

Rendering, duplication, thin internal linking, or conflicting markup creates ambiguity about what each page is.

AI systems can't reliably retrieve it

Important content sits behind scripts, is poorly structured, or is unavailable to the crawlers that feed AI answers.

Agents can't use it

Forms, navigation, and interactions work visually for humans while being difficult for a browser agent to interpret and complete.

AI-ready starts with aSEO-ready.

Pick one service or combine several for the same client. The intake, approval, and reporting stay identical.

Layer 1

Established technical SEO

The layer that decides whether anything else matters.

Crawling
Indexing
Canonicalization
Architecture
Rendering
Performance
Structured data
Internal links
Sitemaps
Redirects

Layer 2

AI search accessibility

Real, documented controls and access questions, not invented AI ranking factors.

AI and search crawler access
Textual content availability
Machine-readable clarity
Entity consistency
Citation and source clarity
Retrieval-friendly information architecture
AI search visibility measurement

Layer 3

Agent readiness

Early but grounded in accessibility and semantics work that already pays off.

Semantic controls
Accessibility tree clarity
Predictable forms
Stable interfaces
Meaningful button and link labels
Machine-understandable interactions
Emerging agent protocols

Google’s own guidance is blunt about this: its generative search features still lean on ordinary SEO foundations, and there is no special AI schema or machine-readable file required to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. We audit the emerging layer honestly, and we label it as emerging.

One audit. Eight technical systems.

Crawl & indexation

Whether search systems can find, fetch, and keep the right URLs.

robots.txt
meta robots
X-Robots-Tag
XML sitemaps
Crawl depth
Orphan pages
Crawl traps
Status codes
Redirect chains
Soft 404s
Indexation patterns
Crawl budget where relevant

Canonicalization & duplication

Whether every piece of content has one obvious address.

robots.txt
meta robots
X-Robots-Tag
XML sitemaps
Crawl depth
Orphan pages
Crawl traps
Status codes
Redirect chains
Soft 404s
Indexation patterns
Crawl budget where relevant

Rendering & JavaScript

Whether search systems can find, fetch, and keep the right URLs.

robots.txt
meta robots
X-Robots-Tag
XML sitemaps
Crawl depth
Orphan pages
Crawl traps
Status codes
Redirect chains
Soft 404s
Indexation patterns
Crawl budget where relevant

Architecture & internal links

Whether every piece of content has one obvious address.

robots.txt
meta robots
X-Robots-Tag
XML sitemaps
Crawl depth
Orphan pages
Crawl traps
Status codes
Redirect chains
Soft 404s
Indexation patterns
Crawl budget where relevant

Performance & experience

Speed and stability measured the way the field measures it now.

robots.txt
meta robots
X-Robots-Tag
XML sitemaps
Crawl depth
Orphan pages
Crawl traps
Status codes
Redirect chains
Soft 404s
Indexation patterns
Crawl budget where relevant

Structured data & machine clarity

Whether every piece of content has one obvious address.

robots.txt
meta robots
X-Robots-Tag
XML sitemaps
Crawl depth
Orphan pages
Crawl traps
Status codes
Redirect chains
Soft 404s
Indexation patterns
Crawl budget where relevant

International & enterprise

Speed and stability measured the way the field measures it now.

robots.txt
meta robots
X-Robots-Tag
XML sitemaps
Crawl depth
Orphan pages
Crawl traps
Status codes
Redirect chains
Soft 404s
Indexation patterns
Crawl budget where relevant

Measurement integrity

Whether every piece of content has one obvious address.

robots.txt
meta robots
X-Robots-Tag
XML sitemaps
Crawl depth
Orphan pages
Crawl traps
Status codes
Redirect chains
Soft 404s
Indexation patterns
Crawl budget where relevant

What each system actually covers.

01 — Crawl & indexation

Every journalist is qualified against

02 — Canonicalization & duplication

Every journalist is qualified against

03 — Rendering & JavaScript

Every journalist is qualified against

04 — Architecture & internal links

Every journalist is qualified against

05 — Performance & experience

Every journalist is qualified against

06 — Structured data & machine clarity

Every journalist is qualified against

07 — International & enterprise

Every journalist is qualified against

08 — Measurement integrity

Every journalist is qualified against

Who can actually access your website?

Concrete, documented controls rather than buzzwords about AI visibility.

System

Purpose

What we audit

Googlebot

Google Search

Access + rendering

Google-Extended

Gemini-related training and grounding controls outside Google Search

Policy review

OAI-SearchBot

ChatGPT Search

Access

Other AI and search crawlers

Platform dependent

Access and policy review

Browser agents

User-delegated actions

Interaction testing

Google-Extended does not control inclusion in Google Search. It is documented as a separate control for certain Gemini training and grounding uses.

OpenAI’s guidance says sites that want to be available in ChatGPT Search should allow OAI-SearchBot and its published IP traffic. It does not promise ranking or placement.

What about llms.txt?

Emerging standard

Can an AI agent actually use your website?.

Task

Find the enterprise plan and request a demo.

Interaction tests

Browser-agent guidance emphasises semantic HTML, real labels, a clean accessibility tree, and stable interactive interfaces. The same work also improves the experience for assistive technology.

Not every technical issue deserves developer time.

Every finding is scored on severity, impact, and effort before it reaches your roadmap.

Issue

Severity

Impact

Effort

Priority

Important pages noindexed

Critical

Very high

Low

P0

JS internal links inaccessible

High

Medium

P1

Duplicate faceted URLs

High

P1

Missing breadcrumb schema

Medium

Low

P2

llms.txt absent

Experimental

Unproven

Low

Optional

Critical

Blocking crawling, indexing, revenue, or major site functionality.

High impact

Meaningful search or visibility opportunity worth engineering time now.

Improvement

Useful, measurable, but not urgent.

Enhancement

Lower-impact cleanup and hygiene.

EXP

Experimental

Emerging AI or agent practice with no established search impact.

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Seven stages, start to validation.

Access

Analytics, Search Console, CMS and stack information, and server logs where available.

Crawl

Multiple crawler and user-agent perspectives, not a single default configuration.

Render

Compare raw source, rendered DOM, and real browser behavior.

Diagnose

Find the pattern behind the errors instead of listing every instance.

Prioritize

Impact multiplied by effort, risk, and business importance.

Handoff

Developer-ready recommendations with acceptance criteria.

Validate

Re-crawl and retest after implementation to confirm the fix held.

You get a roadmap, not an error export.

Executive findings

Technical workbook

Developer specifications

AI / agent appendix

Built to survive the handoff to engineering.

Each finding arrives as a ticket an engineer can pick up without a translation meeting: the problem, the impact, the specification, and the acceptance criteria that close it.

TECH-014

Problem
Product URLs generate duplicate filter combinations.
Impact
Crawl waste plus canonical ambiguity across the product catalogue.
Recommendation
Serve a self-referencing canonical on the unfiltered category URL, return the filtered combinations as noindex, follow, and exclude them from the XML sitemap. Keep single-facet colour URLs indexable where search demand exists.

Acceptance criteria

An audit isn't finished when the PDF is delivered.

Every audit includes a 30-day validation window. We re-test what was shipped and reopen anything that did not land as specified.

Audit

Implementation

Validation crawl

Search Console check

Performance validation

Closed or reopened

Four sites where technical work pays for itself fastest.

SaaS & platforms

JavaScript frameworks, programmatic pages, and product architecture that search systems struggle to parse.

Ecommerce

Facets, product variants, and crawl scale that turn small template decisions into six-figure crawl waste.

Publishers & content sites

Indexation, archives, internal links, and performance across very large libraries.

Migrations & redesigns

Pre-launch checks, redirect mapping, staging review, and post-launch validation.

It's the first agency where I could show our board exactly what we paid for and exactly what it moved. That alone was worth switching.

VP Marketing · Series B SaaS · Boston

It's the first agency where I could show our board exactly what we paid for and exactly what it moved. That alone was worth switching.

VP Marketing · Series B SaaS · Boston

It's the first agency where I could show our board exactly what we paid for and exactly what it moved. That alone was worth switching.

VP Marketing · Series B SaaS · Boston

Scoped to the site, not to a package.

Every audit is quoted after a short scoping call, because a 400-URL site and a 400,000-URL catalogue are not the same job.

Technical health check

For smaller sites or a known, specific problem you need diagnosed properly.

Full technical SEO audit

Search, performance, architecture, and structured data across the whole site.

Search + AI + agent audit

The full audit plus crawler access review, AI-search readiness, and agent usability testing.

Enterprise / migration audit

Large sites, ecommerce catalogues, migrations, and complex JavaScript stacks.

Technical SEO, AI search, and agent readiness.

Area

Technical SEO

AI search readiness

Agent readiness

Crawl and index

Core

Core dependency

Supporting

Rendering

Core

Important

Schema

Search features and context

Supporting

AI crawler controls

Limited

Core

Limited

Entity and content clarity

Supporting

Important

Interactive UX

UX-related

Limited

Core

Accessibility tree

UX benefit

Supporting

Core

llms.txt

Not required

Experimental

Potentially useful, system dependent

Five questions, in the order that matters.

Technical SEO makes content discoverable and usable. Content strategy decides what deserves to exist. Link building makes the strongest assets more authoritative.

Technical foundation

Can search engines and AI systems access and understand us?

Content strategy

Are we publishing the right things, in the right order?

Content production

Are those things actually good enough to be referenced?

Authority building

Do trusted sites reference the work and the brand?

Measurement

Is visibility turning into business outcomes?

Diagnosis first. Then a roadmap.

Senior review, every time

A human technical SEO reads the crawl. The tools produce evidence, not conclusions.

Recommendations engineers accept

Expected behavior, examples, and acceptance criteria written for the ticket, not the slide deck.

Honest about the AI layer

We separate documented controls from experiments and label the difference on the page and in the report.

Honest about the AI layer

Architecture and internal linking findings feed straight into link building and content strategy.

Technical audit questions.

How long does a technical SEO audit take?

Two to four weeks for most sites. Enterprise catalogues, migrations, and log-file work run longer, and we scope the timeline before starting.

What access do you need?

Editorial coverage on relevant, legitimate publications builds authority signals around the topics and pages you need to compete on. It also creates brand mentions and referral paths that pure link acquisition rarely produces.

Do you just send a crawler export?

No. Link building is targeted outreach around content and resources you already own. Digital PR creates something newsworthy first, then earns coverage. Most programs benefit from both, which is why we offer them combined.

Can you implement the fixes?

No. Earned media means earned. We guarantee the research, strategy, asset quality, targeting, outreach effort, follow-up, and reporting. Anyone guaranteeing a named publication is selling placements, not PR.

Is an AI SEO audit different from a technical SEO audit?

Publications that are relevant to your topic and audience, run a real editorial operation, and have genuine search visibility. Trade and industry titles often outperform national press for commercial outcomes.

Do we need an llms.txt file?

A campaign sprint typically runs six to ten weeks from kickoff to coverage, depending on asset complexity. Reactive work moves in days. Always-on programs build compounding results across quarters.

What is agent readiness?

We report it honestly, diagnose why, and adjust. Usually it is angle, timing, or media fit. On always-on programs, that learning goes straight into the next story rather than into a spin exercise.

Do you retest after we implement?

It helps, but no. We can build studies from public datasets, run original surveys, or lead with expert commentary and reactive angles if data is not available.

Can you audit a site before launch?

It can contribute. Third-party mentions across trusted sources are part of how brands and entities get described across the web. Outcomes depend on systems we do not control, so we report signals rather than promise placements.

How do you prioritize findings?

Yes, frequently. We slot in as the earned-media and authority layer, share target lists, and align on messaging so nothing gets double-pitched.

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