Technical SEO Audit

A technically sound website is the foundation of all search visibility — traditional and AI-powered. If search engines and AI crawlers cannot access, render, and interpret your content, no amount of content strategy or link building will compensate. StarkRank’s Technical SEO Audit examines your site’s infrastructure and delivers a prioritised roadmap to fix what is broken and optimise what is underperforming.

What does a technical SEO audit cover?

We examine every layer between your server and the search engine’s index. The audit produces findings across five areas: crawlability, rendering, indexation, structured data, and site performance. Each finding is categorised by severity and estimated impact, so your development team knows exactly what to fix first.

How does crawlability affect AI search visibility?

Search engine crawlers (Googlebot, Bingbot) and AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot) must reach your pages before anything else matters. We audit your robots.txt for unintentional blocks, verify XML sitemaps, check internal link architecture for orphaned pages, and analyse server logs to confirm which bots are actually reaching your content.

AI crawlers have distinct user-agent strings and crawl behaviours. Many sites inadvertently block them through overly restrictive robots.txt rules or CDN firewall settings. We identify and resolve these gaps so your content is eligible for both traditional search results and AI-generated answers. For the broader AI search strategy that builds on this technical foundation, see AI Search Optimisation.

Why does rendering matter for search engines?

AI indexers and even Googlebot’s first pass read raw HTML. Content that only appears after JavaScript execution may be invisible to these systems. We assess whether your critical content — headings, body text, product information, FAQs — is present in the initial HTML response or depends on client-side rendering.

Where we find rendering gaps, we recommend specific fixes: server-side rendering (SSR), pre-rendering for key pages, or hybrid approaches that preserve your existing tech stack. We test with multiple user agents to confirm that what bots see matches what users see.

How do Core Web Vitals affect rankings and AI visibility?

Google uses Core Web Vitals (LCP, CLS, INP) as ranking signals. Pages that load slowly or shift layout unpredictably rank lower and are less likely to appear in AI Overviews. We measure performance against Google’s thresholds:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) — under 2.5 seconds
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) — under 0.1
• Interaction to Next Paint (INP) — under 200 milliseconds

Our audit identifies the specific bottlenecks: unoptimised images, render-blocking scripts, excessive DOM size, slow server response times. Each issue comes with a concrete fix recommendation and expected impact.

What structured data should your site implement?

Structured data (JSON-LD using Schema.org vocabulary) is how you tell search engines and AI models exactly what your content means. Without it, they guess. With it, they extract data with confidence. We audit existing markup for errors, implement missing schema types, and validate everything against Google’s Rich Results Test.

The schema types we assess and implement depend on your business:

• All sites: Organisation, BreadcrumbList, WebSite, WebPage
• Service businesses: Service, FAQPage, HowTo
• E-commerce: Product, Offer, AggregateRating, Review
• Publishers: Article, Author (Person), Speakable
• Local businesses: LocalBusiness with geo-coordinates (covered in depth in our Local SEO Consulting service)

Correctly implemented structured data increases your chances of rich snippets in traditional search and direct citation in AI-generated answers. Inconsistencies between visible content and JSON-LD markup can trigger penalties, so accuracy is critical.

We do not just identify problems — we deliver the fixes. Our development team can implement recommendations directly, or we provide specifications your developers can follow.