GEO Technical SEO Audit

Purpose

Technical SEO forms the foundation of both traditional search visibility and AI search citation. A technically broken site cannot be crawled, indexed, or cited by any platform. This skill audits 8 categories of technical health with specific attention to GEO requirements — most critically, server-side rendering (AI crawlers do not execute JavaScript) and AI crawler access (many sites inadvertently block AI crawlers in robots.txt).

How to Use This Skill

1. Collect the target URL (homepage + 2-3 key inner pages)
2. Fetch each page using curl/WebFetch to get raw HTML and HTTP headers
3. Run through each of the 8 audit categories below
4. Score each category using the rubric
5. Generate GEO-TECHNICAL-AUDIT.md with results

Category 1: Crawlability (15 points)

1.1 robots.txt Validity

• Fetch https://[domain]/robots.txt
• Check for syntactic validity: proper User-agent, Allow, Disallow directives
• Check for common errors: missing User-agent, wildcards blocking important paths, Disallow: / blocking entire site
• Verify XML sitemap is referenced: Sitemap: https://[domain]/sitemap.xml

1.2 AI Crawler Access (CRITICAL for GEO)

Check robots.txt for directives targeting these AI crawlers:

Scoring for AI crawler access:

• All major AI crawlers allowed: 5 points
• Some blocked but Googlebot + Bingbot allowed: 3 points
• GPTBot or PerplexityBot blocked: 1 point (significant GEO impact)
• Googlebot blocked: 0 points (fatal)

Important nuance: Blocking Google-Extended does NOT block Googlebot. Google-Extended only controls AI training data usage, not search indexing. However, blocking Google-Extended may reduce presence in AI Overviews. Recommend allowing Google-Extended unless there is a specific data licensing concern.

1.3 XML Sitemaps

• Fetch sitemap (check robots.txt for location, or try /sitemap.xml, /sitemap_index.xml)
• Validate XML syntax
• Check for <lastmod> dates (should be present and accurate)
• Count URLs — compare to expected number of indexable pages
• Check for sitemap index if large site (50,000+ URLs per sitemap max)
• Verify all sitemap URLs return 200 status codes (sample check)

1.4 Crawl Depth

• Homepage = depth 0. Check that all important pages are reachable within 3 clicks (depth 3)
• Pages at depth 4+ receive significantly less crawl budget and are less likely to be cited by AI
• Check internal linking: are key content pages linked from the homepage or main navigation?

1.5 Noindex Management

• Check for <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> on pages that SHOULD be indexed
• Check for X-Robots-Tag: noindex HTTP headers
• Common mistakes: noindex on paginated pages, category pages, or key landing pages

Category Scoring:

Category 2: Indexability (12 points)

2.1 Canonical Tags

• Every indexable page must have a <link rel="canonical" href="..."> tag
• Canonical must point to itself (self-referencing) for the authoritative version
• Check for conflicting canonicals (canonical in HTML vs. HTTP header)
• Check for canonical chains (A canonicals to B, B canonicals to C — should be A to C)

2.2 Duplicate Content

• Check for www vs. non-www (both should resolve, one should redirect)
• Check for HTTP vs. HTTPS (HTTP should redirect to HTTPS)
• Check for trailing slash consistency (pick one pattern and redirect the other)
• Check for parameter-based duplicates (?sort=price creating duplicate pages)

2.3 Pagination

• If paginated content exists, check for rel="next" / rel="prev" (note: Google ignores these as of 2019, but Bing still uses them)
• Preferred: use rel="canonical" on paginated pages pointing to a view-all page or the first page
• Ensure paginated pages are not noindexed if they contain unique content

2.4 Hreflang (international sites)

• Check for <link rel="alternate" hreflang="xx"> tags
• Validate: reciprocal hreflang (if page A points to page B, B must point back to A)
• Validate: x-default fallback exists
• Check for language/region code validity (ISO 639-1 / ISO 3166-1)

2.5 Index Bloat

• Estimate number of indexed pages (check sitemap count, use site:domain.com estimate)
• Compare indexed pages to actual valuable content pages
• Flag if indexed pages significantly exceed content pages (index bloat from thin/duplicate/parameter pages)

Category Scoring:

Category 3: Security (10 points)

3.1 HTTPS Enforcement

• Site must load over HTTPS
• HTTP must redirect to HTTPS (301 redirect)
• No mixed content warnings (HTTP resources on HTTPS pages)
• SSL/TLS certificate must be valid and not expired

3.2 Security Headers

Check HTTP response headers for:

Category Scoring:

Category 4: URL Structure (8 points)

4.1 Clean URLs

• URLs should be human-readable: /blog/seo-guide not /blog?id=12345
• No session IDs in URLs
• Lowercase only (no mixed case)
• Hyphens for word separation (not underscores)
• No special characters or encoded spaces

4.2 Logical Hierarchy

• URL path should reflect site architecture: /category/subcategory/page
• Flat where appropriate — avoid unnecessarily deep nesting
• Consistent pattern across the site

4.3 Redirect Chains

• Check for redirect chains (A redirects to B redirects to C)
• Maximum 1 hop recommended (A redirects to C directly)
• Check for redirect loops
• All redirects should be 301 (permanent), not 302 (temporary), unless intentionally temporary

4.4 Parameter Handling

• URL parameters should not create duplicate indexable pages
• Use canonical tags or robots.txt Disallow for parameter variations
• Configure parameter handling in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools

Category Scoring:

Category 5: Mobile Optimization (10 points)

Critical Context

As of July 2024, Google crawls ALL sites exclusively with mobile Googlebot. There is no desktop crawling. If your site does not work on mobile, it does not work for Google. Period.

5.1 Responsive Design

• Check f