/seo-technical

name: seo-technical
description: "Find and fix what stops a site from being indexed, fast, and visible to AI crawlers. Input: a site or specific pages. Output: fixes for indexation, robots.txt, sitemaps, IndexNow, Core Web Vitals (LCP/INP/CLS), JS rendering, AI crawler access (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and more), canonicals, hreflang, HTTPS, and migrations. Repo reference for AI crawler control. Use for a technical audit, pages not indexed, slow pages, robots.txt or sitemap issues, llms.txt, content invisible to ChatGPT, a migration, or a hacked site."
license: MIT
metadata:
  author: "Sorank (https://sorank.com)"
  version: "1.0.0"

Technical SEO: crawl, index, render

Technical SEO decides whether content can be fetched, parsed, indexed, and trusted by Google, Bing, and AI answer engines (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini). In 2026 the discipline split in two: Googlebot renders JavaScript and tolerates slow pages, AI crawlers do neither. Treat the raw HTML response as the product.

Work in this order: indexation, rendering, speed. A fast page that is not indexed earns nothing. An indexed page whose content only appears after client-side JavaScript runs is invisible to every AI engine except Google's. Every threshold below is labeled either official or measured (with a source URL) or field heuristic from 115+ agency audits.

Company knowledge first (Obsidian)

If the working environment contains an Obsidian vault or any local knowledge base (a folder of .md notes, often with a .obsidian directory), read the relevant notes before acting: brand and product facts, target keywords, competitors, and the SEO action log of what was already tried. Ground every recommendation in that context instead of asking the user for facts the vault already holds. At the end of the session, append the actions taken to the vault's SEO action log so the next session starts informed.

When to use this skill

Use it for:

• Full technical audits and pre-sales triage of any site
• "Why is my site (or page) not indexed" investigations
• robots.txt, meta robots, sitemap, canonical, and hreflang work
• Core Web Vitals (LCP, INP, CLS), PageSpeed, image weight
• JavaScript rendering decisions: SPA versus SSR versus SSG
• AI crawler access: this skill owns references/ai-crawlers.md, the canonical crawler reference for the whole skill set
• llms.txt questions (see the honest verdict section)
• Site migrations, redesigns, domain changes
• Hacked-site cleanup (injected spam links)

Hand off neighboring problems:

• Diagnosing a dated traffic or ranking loss before fixing anything: use the seo-traffic-drop skill
• Converting a client-rendered site built by an AI generator (Lovable, Base44, Bolt, and similar) into served HTML: use the seo-ai-site-builders skill
• Orphan pages and link architecture: use the seo-internal-linking skill
• JSON-LD and structured data: use the seo-schema-markup skill
• Writing content so AI engines quote it: use the geo-visibility skill
• Measuring AI citations and AI referral traffic: use the geo-tracking skill
• One-pass scored audit of a whole site: use the seo-geo-audit skill

Workflow

Step 0: Secure measurement access

Before any recommendation, confirm both:

1. Google Search Console is verified (domain property preferred) and you can actually open it. 2. GA4, or an equivalent analytics tool, is installed and collecting.

Field finding from 115+ agency audits: a large share of audited sites had neither installed, or had them installed with nobody able to access the accounts. Without GSC you cannot see coverage, queries, or manual actions, and every later step degrades into guessing. Set both up first, then add Bing Webmaster Tools: it imports GSC properties in a few clicks and matters in 2026 because Bing's index feeds ChatGPT search (https://yoast.com/chatgpt-search/).

**Check the tags PAGE BY PAGE, not once on the homepage.** "Analytics is installed" is a site-wide claim that is wrong more often than not: the tag goes into one template and never into the others, so the blog measures nothing while the homepage does. The bundled collector reports it per page and names the gaps:

python3 scripts/seo_audit.py https://example.com /services /blog /pricing /contact

Read the `Measurement coverage` block at the end of the report:

• `GA4 tag found on N of M page(s)`, with the missing URLs listed. Any page that a visitor can land on and that carries no tag is a hole in the funnel: it is the pages that convert (pricing, contact, checkout) that get forgotten most often.
• `GA4: unknown (a GTM container can load it)` is NOT a missing tag. A GTM container loads GA4 without ever writing a `G-` id in the HTML. Open the container, or the browser Tag Assistant, before writing anything in a report. Calling that "no analytics" in front of a client who does have it discredits the whole audit.
• `Universal Analytics tag still on the page`: UA stopped collecting in July 2024. It is dead weight and it hides the fact that no live property exists.
• Two different `G-` ids across the pages: two properties collecting the same site, and every report split in half.

Search Console ownership: the collector reads the `google-site-verification` meta tag. **Its absence proves nothing**, because four of the five verification methods (DNS record, HTML file, GA4, GTM) leave no trace in the page. Ask the owner to open the property rather than declaring it unverified. What you do verify from the outside: that the tag, when present, is on the homepage, because removing it later un-verifies the property.

For a fast automated first pass, run the bundled audit script from the seo-geo-audit skill (scripts/seo_audit.py), which checks robots.txt AI bot rules, sitemap, and on-page basics. Use its output to direct the manual work below. For the site-wide view (status codes, broken links, redirect chains, internal links to redirects, noindex or canonicalized pages that receive links, sitemap