auditing-technical-seolisted

# Auditing Technical SEO ## Overview Technical SEO is the foundation. Content strategy, keyword work, and link building all assume that Google, Bing, and AI-search crawlers can actually fetch, render, and trust your pages. If any of those fail, nothing else compounds. In 2026 that surface is wider than it used to be: Core Web Vitals are still the user-experience signal Google measures at the **75th percentile** with thresholds **LCP < 2.5s, INP < 200ms, CLS < 0.1** [1], and a new tier of AI crawlers — GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended — now decides whether your content shows up in ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity answers [2][3]. ## What this skill checks - **Crawlability:** `robots.txt` parses cleanly and stays under Google's 500 KiB parse cap (bytes past it are ignored) [6]; no accidental site-wide `Disallow: /`; sitemap referenced as an absolute URL, reachable, valid, and within the single-sitemap limits of **50,000 URLs / 50 MB uncompressed** — split into a sitemap index above either [7]. Run `node scripts/baseline-check.js <url>` rather than eyeballing these. - **Indexability:** GSC index coverage cross-referenced via `gsc-mcp`, canonical tags consistent and self-referential where appropriate, hreflang correct on i18n sites, no duplicate content via tracking parameters, no `noindex` on pages that should rank [5]. - **Rendering:** SSR/SSG vs CSR-only routes (CSR-only pages are largely invisible to GPTBot/ClaudeBot/Per