/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. Vault structure, read-first and write-back protocols: the obsidian-brain skill.

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/).

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.

Step 1: Read the indexation state

In GSC, open Indexing > Pages and compute the ratio of indexed to submitted pages.

• 75 percent or more indexed (for example 3,000 indexed of 4,000 submitted) is healthy on a mature site (field heuristic).
• Below 50 percent, stop and investigate before anything else: duplication, thin pages, crawl traps, leftover noindex, or rendering failures.

Then act on the gaps:

• Priority pages not indexed: inspect each with the URL Inspection tool, fix the reported cause, then click Request Indexing. The quota is roughly 10 to 12 requests per day per property, so spend it on money pages, not the archive.
• Bulk indexation, not page by page: ignore the "index 10 URLs per day" ritual some platforms (Wix and others) push. Manual one-by-one submission scales to nothing. Submit the full sitemap in GSC once and let Google discover every URL from it; reserve manual Request Indexing for a handful of priority pages (field heuristic from 115+ agency audits).
• Scaled and programmatic pages, the indexation condition: thousands of generated pages (one per city, per combination) only get indexed when each page carries genuinely unique content. The same block copied across all of them is the classic non-indexation cause: Google treats near-duplicate templates as one page and drops the rest. Uniqueness per page is the price of admission for scaled content, not an optimization (field heuristic from 115+ agency audits).
• 404s with history: any URL that previously earned traffic or backlinks and now returns 404 gets a 301 to the closest equivalent page. Never blanket-redirect everything to the homepage: Google treats irrelevant mass redirects as soft 404s.
• Orphan pages: target zero. Detection and fixes belong to the seo-internal-linking skill.

Measurement artifact (S