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Free Technical SEO Checklist: 36 Points for Search & AI
Make sure Google, Bing and AI search can crawl, index and load your website. Work through 36 checks across 7 areas and download your results as a PDF.
- 36 Checks
- Take 20 - 30 minutes
- 100% Free
Technical SEO Checklist
Work through each section to make sure search engines and AI search can crawl, index and load your site. Nothing is saved between visits, so finish in one sitting or copy what's left and pass it to your developer.
Crawling & robots.txt
Indexing
XML Sitemap
Site Structure & Links
Speed & Core Web Vitals
Mobile, Security & Rendering
Structured Data & AI Search
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What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO is the work that helps search engines and AI assistants crawl, render, index and load your website. It covers robots.txt, XML sitemaps, canonical tags, redirects, site speed and Core Web Vitals, mobile usability, HTTPS and structured data. If these fail, even great content can stay invisible.
PROCESS
How to Use This Checklist
Enter your website
Add your page (optional) so your PDF shows which site it's for.
Open your tools
Google Search Console, PageSpeed Insights and your SEO plugin.
Tick each check that passes
Anything unticked is your fix list.
Download
or copy the remaining items and share them with your developer.
What Does Technical SEO Include?
These key elements help search engines understand your website better
Crawlability
Robots.txt, internal links and click depth decide what search engines can find.
Indexing
Canonicals, noindex tags and redirects decide which pages appear in search.
XML sitemap
A clean list of the pages you want indexed.
Speed & Core Web Vitals
LCP, INP and CLS measure how fast and stable pages feel.
Mobile & security
Google indexes the mobile version of your site, served over HTTPS.
Structured data & AI search
Schema and clean HTML help Google and AI answers
Common Technical SEO Mistakes
Avoid These mistakes that can hurt your rankings.
- Empty or thin pages left indexable
- Menu links that go through redirects
- Sitemaps full of redirected or noindex URLs
- A leftover noindex tag or "Discourage search engines" setting after launch
- Slow mobile pages caused by render-blocking CSS and JavaScript
- Wrong or missing schema, such as Article markup on service pages
Frequently Asked Questions
A technical SEO checklist is a list of checks that make sure search engines can crawl, index and load your website properly. It covers robots.txt, sitemaps, canonical tags, redirects, Core Web Vitals, mobile usability, HTTPS and structured data.
Run a full check every three months, and a quick one after any redesign, migration, plugin change or large content update. Those are the moments things usually break.
No. It’s a manual checklist. Use it alongside Google Search Console and PageSpeed Insights, which give you the data for most checks.
Technical SEO covers the whole site: crawling, indexing, speed and security. On-page SEO covers each page’s content: titles, headings, keywords, images and internal links. Use this checklist first, then the On-Page SEO Checklist for each page.
Google says ranking in its AI Overviews and AI Mode relies on the same SEO basics as normal search, so no special file is needed for Google. What matters is that your pages can be crawled and indexed and your content is clear. You can decide in robots.txt which other AI crawlers may access your site.
Yes. Book a free 15-minute consultation and I’ll look at your site and tell you which fixes matter most.
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