A technical audit is the foundation of every other SEO service.
If a system can’t crawl your site, it can’t index it. If it can’t render your pages, it can’t understand them. And if it can’t understand them, it can’t cite you — no matter how good your content is.
That used to mean one crawler. It now means several, and they don’t behave alike. Googlebot renders JavaScript; most AI crawlers don’t, or do it partially, or fetch a page once and never return. A site that is technically fine for Google can be functionally invisible to the systems increasingly deciding which brands get mentioned.
The purpose of this audit is to find out what each of them actually sees.
What the audit covers
Crawling. Can search engines and AI crawlers navigate your URLs efficiently — and are they? Server logs tell you what actually happened, not what should have.
Indexing. Is your content being indexed, and is the indexed version the one you intended?
Architecture. Does your site structure organise meaning, or just organise files? Architecture is what makes a site legible to a machine that has to infer relationships between pages.
Internal linking. Does it guide users toward conversion, and distribute ranking signals where they matter?
Rendering and the retrieval gap. The part most audits skip. I compare what your server sends in raw HTML against what appears after rendering — and against what AI fetchers actually retrieve. JavaScript-dependent content, JSON hydration patterns, and client-side injected markup are the three most common ways a site quietly disappears from AI systems while ranking normally in Google.
AI crawler behaviour. How GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and others crawl you, what your robots.txt currently permits, and whether your access decisions are deliberate or inherited from a default nobody reviewed.
Technical duplication. Duplication is often a symptom of a technical cause. This diagnoses the cause, not the symptom.
Structured data as entity infrastructure. Schema is not a ranking lever and never was. It’s machine-readable business registration, and it operates across three separate lifecycles: indexing, pretraining, and runtime. I check whether your implementation is valid, whether it’s consistent across templates, and whether it actually resolves your brand to the entity you want it resolved to. Structured data breaks easily and silently; most of the value here is in finding what has already broken.
Images and video. Search results are multimodal and increasingly so. Are your visual assets retrievable, or just present?
Page experience. Speed and usability, insofar as they affect quality classification, conversion, and crawl efficiency.
Where relevant, the audit also covers the technical specifications of international SEO (hreflang, geo-targeting, market configuration) and other vertical kinds of SEO analyses (e.g., Local Search, News SEO).
What this audit does not include
Scope clarity protects both of us. This audit is technical. It does not cover:
Keyword, entity and topical research
- On-page optimisation
- Content audit and strategy
- Content localisation for international sites
- Brand Amplification review and strategy
Those sit inside the Strategic SEO & AI Search Audit. If you’re unsure which you need, ask: that’s usually a ten-minute conversation, not a proposal.
