Last updated: November 2026

A technical SEO audit checks whether search engines can find, read and correctly understand a website. It used to be a large project run once a year. Today most checks can be automated and repeated every week. This checklist shows what an automated audit should cover.

1. Accessibility and crawling

• Does robots.txt return status 200 without blocking important areas such as CSS or JavaScript files?
• Do all important pages answer with status 200?
• Are there server errors (5xx) that only occur from time to time?
• Do internal links point to pages that return 404?

2. Indexability

• Do pages that should be found carry no noindex – neither in the HTML nor in the HTTP header?
• Does the canonical tag point to the page itself or deliberately to another page?
• Does a canonical point to an address that redirects or cannot be reached?

3. Duplicate addresses

The same page is often reachable under several addresses: with and without www, over http and https, with and without a trailing slash or with parameters attached. All variants should point to one main address with a permanent redirect (301).

4. Redirects

• Redirect chains: every redirect should arrive at its target directly.
• Temporary redirects (302) that are actually permanent.
• Internal links that point to a redirect instead of the final target.

5. Sitemaps

• Is the XML sitemap listed in robots.txt and submitted in Search Console?
• Does it only contain pages that return 200, are indexable and declare themselves as canonical?

6. Multiple languages

With several language versions the audit checks the hreflang annotations: do the versions refer to each other, are the language codes valid, and does the lang attribute in the HTML match the actual language of the page?

7. Speed, structured data, internal links and images

The audit also covers Core Web Vitals, structured data that only describes visible content, pages without internal links, click depth, and images without alternative text or with oversized files.

From audit to routine

An audit is only useful if its findings become tasks. Sort them by impact, look for shared causes, and verify every fix in the next crawl. Read our guide to SEO automation to see how the audit fits into the whole process.