Short answer: A technical SEO audit should produce a repair plan that a development team can execute and a business owner can assess. The useful unit is a verified issue on a relevant page, with an explanation, a proposed change and an acceptance check. A large list of warnings is only a starting point.
This is for owners, marketers and developers of a company website who are commissioning or running an audit. Begin with the pages that explain what the business sells, the cases that prove its experience and the routes through which a visitor makes contact. Then inspect the templates and language versions that support those journeys. The sources linked below were checked on 27 October 2026.
What should the audit cover?
Record the domain, environments, languages and page groups being examined. Identify which public pages should be discoverable and which account, preview or internal routes are outside the search scope. Do not crawl authenticated customer material as part of a public-site review.
Save a baseline inventory of the important URLs. For each, record its purpose, response, title, index instructions and links from other pages. Use a crawler such as Screaming Frog for repeatable inspection, but keep business relevance in the prioritisation. A broken enquiry path deserves attention even if its template generates only one warning.
How do crawling and indexing differ?
The robots.txt standard as documented by Google controls crawler access. It is not a dependable way to keep an HTML page out of Google Search. Review indexing instructions and authentication separately from crawl permissions.
Compare the page a visitor sees with the response and rendered content available to the relevant search system. Check for accidental noindex instructions, an unexpected login wall, an error page returned with a successful status, or a service explanation that only appears after an interaction.
Where authorised account access exists, use Search Console URL Inspection to examine Google's information about the URL. A public page responding successfully proves only that particular request worked. It does not establish that Google indexed it.
How do you make the intended URL clear?
A site may expose tracking URLs, old slugs, print versions or duplicate category routes. Google describes redirects and canonical annotations as stronger canonicalisation signals than sitemap inclusion, while retaining its own canonical selection. See Google's canonical documentation.
For an audit, first explain why two URLs are considered equivalent. Then check whether links, redirects, canonical references and the sitemap express a coherent preference. Do not redirect a valuable old page simply because a new naming pattern looks cleaner. Plan a migration only when it solves a documented problem.
Keep a record of the requested canonical and the search engine's selected version where that information is available. A mismatch is something to investigate, not an instruction to add more identical tags.
How do you audit a multilingual website?
Google's localisation guidance explains how alternate-language annotations help it identify appropriate versions. Fully translated main content is not treated as a duplicate merely because the subject is shared.
We also recommend checking the visitor's experience: correct language links, readable right-to-left layouts, useful local terminology and forms that work in each supported script. An Arabic page should not send its consultation request into an English-only dead end.
Use a small matrix of equivalent service and case pages to inspect the implementation. If there is no genuine translated counterpart, record the gap instead of pointing the language switcher to unrelated content.
How should you test performance on a meaningful journey?
Use PageSpeed Insights to distinguish available field evidence from a controlled diagnostic. Use Lighthouse findings to form a repair task, such as resizing a large image or investigating avoidable work during an interaction. The difference between lab and field data is covered in a practical Google SEO toolkit.
Retest under comparable conditions and record what changed. Include practical checks of the actual journey: open the service, inspect the case, choose a contact action and complete the form. Technical work should support a usable product, not just a presentation score.
How do you check AI search access with the provider's rules?
For a Perplexity access review, its crawler documentation distinguishes the search crawler, PerplexityBot, from Perplexity-User, which supports user-initiated page retrieval. Check the documented identity and access rules, plus any hosting or firewall behaviour. A permissive robots.txt file alone does not prove successful retrieval through every layer.
Apply the same evidence-led approach to each search system. Do not disable a site's protections globally to improve a crawler score. Resolve a specific verified problem and retain a record of the resulting behaviour. For how Google and Bing report AI search, see SEO and GEO: what changes, and how to measure it.
What does a verified fix and handover look like?
An accepted repair item should include the affected URLs, evidence, business impact, owner, proposed change, dependencies and verification method. Separate confirmed blockers from hypotheses and cosmetic improvements.
After publication, check the live page and request discovery through the appropriate supported methods. Google says recrawling may take days to weeks, that repeated requests for the same URL do not accelerate it, and that a request does not guarantee inclusion. See Google's recrawl guidance.
Frequently asked questions
What should the client receive?
An inventory, prioritised findings, implementation scope and evidence of the fixes actually completed. Work waiting for access or another supplier should remain visible.
Does an audit guarantee rankings?
No. It identifies and helps resolve issues within its scope. Demand, relevance, competition and external search systems still affect visibility.
Where should we start with an existing website?
Begin with a scoped SEO and GEO review. If the evidence points to a larger structural problem, our web-design service can then scope the appropriate rebuild or targeted improvement.