Diagnose and prioritize the technical issues blocking a site from being crawled, indexed, ranked, and cited. Modern technical SEO has two audiences: Google's crawler/indexer and AI answer engines (GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, etc.). Both need HTML-visible content and a clean crawl path.
Technical SEO and AI Crawler Audit examines crawlability, indexation, site architecture, performance, security, and log-file patterns alongside access and behavior of AI crawlers and fetchers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, etc.). It validates robots.txt and meta robots policies, canonical integrity, hreflang, sitemap accuracy, JavaScript rendering dependencies, Core Web Vitals, structured data health, and whether AI bots are blocked unintentionally while Googlebot remains healthy.
Findings connect technical fixes to ranking, snippet, and AI citation outcomes—not audit scores for their own sake.
Technical SEO specialists, dev teams during migrations, and SEO leads when organic traffic dropped after robots changes or when AI visibility efforts require explicit bot policy decisions. Essential for large sites, headless frontends, and ecommerce faceted navigation risk.
Crawl site with representative URL samples including templates, pagination, filters, and media assets. Review robots.txt evolution, sitemap completeness, status codes, redirect chains, duplicate content signals. Audit AI bot rules against company policy: allow research crawlers for visibility versus block for training concerns with documented tradeoffs.
Log file analysis sample for crawl budget waste if available. Prioritize dev tickets with reproduction steps and expected SEO impact. Re-test after deploy.
Teams ask should we block GPTBot—workflows present business tradeoffs between content protection and AEO visibility, not one-size answers. Another question is JavaScript SEO parity; audit identifies user versus bot rendering gaps.
Headless CMS and SSR/ISR setups get Next.js-aware checks common in modern marketing stacks.
Provide domain, CMS/stack notes, recent migration timeline, and bot policy preferences. Request full technical audit or AI crawler policy review only. Implement fixes with devs, then re-crawl validation task. Combine with SEO Audit for page-level content issues and Reporting for indexation monitoring ongoing.
Crawl budget analysis identifies low-value URL explosion from filters, internal search pages, and thin pagination wasting bot attention on money pages. Security and indexation interactions cover staging domain exposure, accidental noindex on production templates, and HTTPS mixed content blocking render. AI bot policy documentation helps legal and marketing agree on explicit allow/block lists with business rationale recorded for future audits. Performance correlation notes tie CWV regressions to template deploys and third-party script bloat affecting both users and crawlers.
Hreflang validation for multinational sites catches reciprocal errors and x-default gaps that confuse both Google and AI fetchers selecting locale-specific citations. JavaScript framework-specific guidance—hydration timing, streaming SSR, edge caching—informs dev tickets with stack-aware reproduction steps rather than generic SEO advice.
For broader context, see our roundup of claude marketing skills, and read best Claude skills for marketing agencies for related setup guidance.