Technical SEO Audit Checklist: 25 Things to Check in 2026

Technical SEO is the foundation of every high-ranking website. This 25-point checklist covers everything Google and AI search engines look for.

🔧 Crawling & Indexing (1–7)

• robots.txt is accessible and not blocking important pages
• XML sitemap is submitted to Google Search Console
• All important pages are indexed (use site:domain.com)
• No duplicate content issues (www vs non-www, http vs https)
• Canonical tags are correctly set on all pages
• No orphan pages (every page has at least one internal link)
• Pagination is handled correctly with rel=next/prev or canonical

⚡ Page Speed & Core Web Vitals (8–13)

• LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) under 2.5 seconds
• FID/INP (Interaction to Next Paint) under 200ms
• CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) under 0.1
• Images are compressed and served in WebP format
• CSS and JavaScript are minified and deferred where possible
• Server response time (TTFB) under 200ms

🔒 Security & HTTPS (14–16)

• SSL certificate is active and valid
• All pages redirect from HTTP to HTTPS
• www redirects to non-www (or vice versa) with 301

📊 Structured Data & Schema (17–20)

• Organisation or LocalBusiness schema on homepage
• Article schema on blog posts
• FAQPage schema where relevant
• No schema validation errors in Google Rich Results Test

🤖 AI Search Readiness (21–25)

• llms.txt file exists at /llms.txt
• Content uses clear question-and-answer format
• Brand is mentioned on authoritative third-party sites
• sameAs links point to verified government/directory profiles
• Person schema links founder to LinkedIn and Wikidata