What the technical audit examines
Markup problems are cheap to fix and expensive to ignore, because every other discipline depends on them. A missing viewport tag breaks mobile usability. A stray canonical removes a page from search. A 200 response on a page that says “not found” keeps dead URLs indexed indefinitely.
- robots.txt valid and permissive where it matters — It returns 200, parses cleanly, and blocks nothing you need indexed — including any stale directive left over from a staging deploy.
- Every important page indexable — No unintended
noindexin meta tags or X-Robots-Tag headers, and no page that is indexable but unreachable. - Sitemap exists and is accurate — Canonical, indexable URLs only — no redirects, no 404s, no
noindexpages — and referenced from robots.txt. - Canonical tags correct — One self-referencing canonical per URL, absolute, on HTTPS and on the preferred hostname, agreeing with the sitemap and crawl directives.
- URL structure shallow and consistent — Directory depth, parameter handling, trailing-slash and case consistency, and duplicate URLs reachable by more than one path.
- No broken links or redirect chains — Internal links resolving in one hop with a 200, and no chains, loops or temporary redirects doing permanent jobs.
- Error handling honest — Missing URLs returning 404 or 410 rather than 200, and error pages that are useful and not indexable by accident.
How the crawl works
The crawler requests each URL and records the full response: status, headers, timing and the HTML as delivered. These checks read the HTML as delivered, so head tags, canonicals and redirects written client-side are not evaluated — anything load-bearing for search should be present in the server response, and the audit judges it on that basis. Markup validity and document-head configuration are also assessed here rather than in the SEO category, since that is where the fixes live.
Findings this audit commonly surfaces
- Missing title tag
- Missing or conflicting canonical
- Missing viewport meta tag
- Heading structure problems
- Broken links and redirect chains
What is out of scope
This is an audit of the delivered document, not of your codebase. We do not review application source, framework configuration or build tooling, and we do not open pull requests. Findings are written against URLs and rendered output so that whoever owns the template can locate the cause quickly.
Related categories
Technical findings feed directly into the SEO audit (indexing and metadata), the accessibility audit (semantics and landmarks) and the performance audit (redirect overhead and unsized media). The website audit checklist lists the whole set in a form you can work through yourself.