Technical audit
A technical SEO audit that also checks what AI crawlers can see
A full crawl of your site, a prioritised list of what to fix, and a check most audits skip: whether ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI can reach and read your pages at all.
The problem
A site can rank on Google and still be invisible to AI assistants. One blocked crawler at robots.txt or the CDN is enough, and nothing in your analytics will tell you.
Most technical audits were designed before AI search. They check what Googlebot sees and stop there.
What we do
A full crawl for crawlability, indexation, redirects and status codes, so we know what search engines and AI crawlers can and cannot reach.
Titles, headings, structured data, internal linking and page speed, page by page.
We check robots.txt, the CDN and the rendered page for GPTBot, ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot and Google-Extended.
Deliverables
- A full-site crawl with every issue logged against its URL
- An AI crawler access report: which bots are allowed, blocked or served an empty page
- A structured data review with the schema each page type should carry
- Internal linking and site architecture findings
- Core Web Vitals and page speed results
- A prioritised fix list your developers can work from, ordered by impact
What the audit covers
- 1. Crawl and indexation
Status codes, redirect chains, canonical tags, sitemaps, orphaned pages and anything that stops a page from being indexed.
- 2. On-page
Title tags, meta descriptions, heading structure and duplicate content, checked against the terms each page should target.
- 3. Structured data
Organization, Product, FAQ, Article and Review schema: what is present, what is broken, what is missing.
- 4. Architecture and internal links
How authority flows through the site, which pages are buried, and where a pillar page should sit.
- 5. Speed
Core Web Vitals on the templates that matter, with the specific cause of each failure.
- 6. AI access and readability
Whether AI crawlers are allowed in, whether the content is in the HTML or hidden behind JavaScript, and whether a passage can be lifted cleanly.
Why the AI check matters
Cortico Health had every major AI crawler blocked and did not know. The fix took days. Their robots.txt now allows the crawlers, and anyone can check that for themselves. Blocks like this are common because security tools and CDN defaults add them quietly.
Client results
Went from blocked by every major AI crawler to fully open to them in days
Content pages grew 7x to 28x in impressions, and average position across the domain roughly halved
Non-branded organic traffic grew roughly 10x in a year and is still climbing
Further reading
Frequently asked questions
What is a technical SEO audit?
A technical SEO audit is a full review of how search engines crawl, render and index a website. It covers status codes, redirects, canonicals, structured data, internal linking and page speed, and ends in a prioritised list of fixes.
How is this different from the AI visibility audit?
The AI visibility audit looks outward: which prompts name you, which name competitors, and which sources the engines cite. The technical audit looks inward at your own site. Most clients need both, and the 30-day sprint includes both.
Which AI crawlers do you check?
GPTBot and ChatGPT-User from OpenAI, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot from Anthropic, and Google-Extended, at robots.txt and at the CDN, plus what each one receives when it requests a page.
Do you fix the issues or only report them?
Either. The audit is written so your developers can work from it. On a retainer we implement the fixes ourselves or work alongside your team.
Which platforms do you audit?
Any site that can be crawled. We have audited Shopify stores, WordPress sites and custom builds, including single-page apps where the content is rendered in JavaScript.
See where you stand in AI search
Free audit. No commitment.
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