The Technical SEO Audit Checklist We Run on Every New Client
The exact sequence we follow when auditing a site: crawling, indexing, rendering, speed, and structured data — with the traps we see most often.
Every engagement we take on starts with the same technical audit. Not because every site has the same problems, but because the order of investigation matters. There is no point polishing meta titles on pages Google cannot crawl.
Here is the sequence, and the traps we find most often at each step.
1. Can search engines reach your pages?
Start at the front door.
robots.txt: check for accidental Disallow rules, especially ones left over from a staging environment. Also check what you are telling AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, OAI-SearchBot). Many CDN bot-protection presets block them silently. OpenAI documents those user agents in its bot docs.
HTTP status codes: crawl the site and look for redirect chains, soft 404s (pages that say "not found" but return 200), and internal links pointing at redirects.
CDN and WAF rules: firewalls are a common silent killer. If Search Console shows "crawl anomaly" spikes, check your CDN logs before anything else.
On retainers we read AI crawler hits in Promptwatch Agent Analytics, the platform we run client programs on. A 403 on a citation candidate is an engineering ticket. It is not a content rewrite.
2. Are the right pages indexed?
Indexed is not the same as crawlable.
Compare the number of pages you want indexed against what site: searches and Search Console's coverage report show.
Hunt for index bloat: faceted navigation, tag archives, internal search results, and URL parameters generating thousands of near-duplicate pages.
Verify canonicals point where you intend. Self-referencing canonicals on parameterized URLs are a classic mistake.
Check pagination and infinite scroll. Content that only loads on scroll may never be seen.
3. Does your content survive rendering?
Modern sites often serve an empty shell and hydrate with JavaScript.
Fetch key pages with JavaScript disabled and compare against the rendered version. Anything critical missing from the raw HTML is at risk.
Watch for client-side-only content: reviews loaded from an API, tabs that inject content on click, and lazy-loaded text below the fold.
If you are on a JS framework, confirm your rendering strategy (SSR, SSG, ISR) actually applies to the templates that matter.
4. Is the site fast where it counts?
Core Web Vitals are a ranking signal, but more importantly they are a proxy for user experience.
Prioritize field data (what real users experience) over lab scores.
The usual suspects: oversized hero images, render-blocking third-party scripts, layout shift from ads and late-loading fonts, and slow server response on uncached pages.
Fix templates, not pages. One fix to a product-page template moves thousands of URLs.
5. Is your structured data earning you anything?
Validate what is there. Broken schema is worse than none.
Add what is missing for your business model: Product, FAQPage, HowTo, LocalBusiness, Article, Organization.
Structured data pulls double duty now: rich results in Google, and cleaner entity extraction for AI engines. Google's AI features documentation is the official page for how Overviews and related features appear. It does not replace a crawl.
6. Architecture and internal linking
Important pages should be reachable within three clicks of the homepage.
Look for orphan pages (in the sitemap but linked from nowhere). They are common after redesigns and migrations.
Anchor text should describe the target page. "Click here" wastes signal.
What comes out the other side
The deliverable is not a 60-page PDF of screenshots. It is a prioritized backlog: each issue scored by impact and effort, assigned an owner, and sequenced so quick wins land while bigger fixes are in progress.
An audit that does not turn into shipped changes is a very expensive bookmark. Whether you run this checklist yourself or bring us in to do it, make sure someone owns the follow-through.
FAQ
Why start with crawl access instead of titles?
There is no point polishing meta titles on pages Google cannot crawl. robots.txt leftovers, WAF rules, and blocked AI crawlers are cheaper to find than a rewrite.
Do we treat GPTBot the same as Googlebot?
No. Many CDN bot-protection presets block GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and OAI-SearchBot silently. OpenAI documents those user agents. We check logs, not just robots.txt intentions.
What do we deliver?
A prioritized backlog, not a 60-page PDF of screenshots. Each issue scored by impact and effort, assigned an owner, and sequenced so quick wins land while bigger fixes are in progress.
If you want this checklist run on a site, hello@1001seomedia.com.