Technical SEO audit checklist: a practitioner’s workflow
A step-by-step technical SEO audit checklist: crawl setup, status codes, indexability, canonicals, sitemaps, internal links, structured data and hreflang.
Private beta · Interactive demo available now
Technical SEO monitoring, GEO audits & AI visibility for agenciesFind SEO issues. Monitor changes. Prove your work.
Technical SEO auditing, GEO readiness checks, AI visibility observations and agency-ready reporting in one workspace, with the evidence behind every finding.
No sign-up for the demo. It uses a fictional agency and fictional websites.
Why it exists
An audit is a snapshot. Client sites keep changing.
SEO Sentinel is built for the work that happens after the first audit: watching for regressions, separating real problems from noise, and showing clients what changed with evidence.
A one-off audit goes stale
A release, plugin update or CMS change can break redirects, canonicals or internal links the week after you delivered the audit. Without repeat checks, the client may notice before you do.
Crawl exports aren’t a client deliverable
Thousands of rows tell a client nothing. Repeated findings need to be grouped into the few template-level fixes that matter, with evidence a developer can act on.
Clients are asking about AI search
You need a defensible answer to “are we showing up in ChatGPT?” that doesn’t rest on vanity scores or claims nobody can verify.
“What changed?” is hard to answer honestly
When two crawls covered different pages, an issue that disappeared may simply not have been re-checked. Proving your work means comparing like with like.
How it works
Audit → Prioritize → Monitor → Report
One workflow per client website, from the first crawl to the monthly report.
Audit
Crawl a client site and collect technical, indexability, structured-data, hreflang, link, image and on-page findings, each with evidence.
Prioritize
Group repeated findings by root cause, separate confirmed errors from advisory opportunities, and start with what affects the most pages.
Monitor
Schedule daily, weekly or monthly audits. Each completed audit is compared with the previous one, so regressions and fixes are flagged.
Report
Build a branded report from stored audit data: executive summary, root causes, GEO readiness, comparisons and an action plan.
Technical SEO audit
Findings you can defend, grouped by what to fix
Every finding shows the evidence it rests on and a recommendation. Severity separates confirmed errors from warnings, threshold-based opportunities and informational notices, and root-cause grouping turns 120 repeated findings into the one template fix behind them.
- Status codes, redirect chains and loops, XML sitemap problems
- Technical indexability, with canonicals read from HTML and HTTP headers
- JSON-LD syntax, Schema.org basics and a documented subset of Google rich-result rules
- hreflang from HTML, headers and sitemaps, including missing return links
- Broken internal links prioritised by linking pages, click depth, inlinks and anchor text
- Titles, descriptions, headings, image alt text, thin and near-duplicate content
Monitoring & comparisons
Know what changed since the last audit
Schedule audits per client site. Each completed audit is compared with the previous completed one: issues are new, resolved, still present, first seen on newly crawled pages, or not re-checked. A page the newer crawl didn’t reach is never counted as fixed.
- Daily, weekly or monthly schedules at a set local time
- In-dashboard notifications for new errors and URLs that started failing
- Coverage differences and page-limit changes explained on every comparison
GEO & AI visibility
Readiness checks and recorded observations, kept clearly apart
Two separate tools answer two separate questions, and neither pretends to be a score.
GEO / AI-search readiness
Runs with every audit, at no extra crawl cost. It checks robots.txt rules for 13 documented AI and search crawlers and tokens, content structure, entity consistency and source signals on article pages.
It tells you: whether the site is easy to access and understand.
It can’t tell you: whether AI tools will mention or cite it.
AI visibility tracking
Keep a set of tracked questions per client, record what an AI tool answered, and SEO Sentinel finds brand mentions, competitor mentions and citations of the client’s website, with excerpts as evidence.
Important: answers are recorded by you. SEO Sentinel does not query ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or any other AI service.
AI visibility tracking → Agency reporting & workspaces
Branded reports built from stored evidence
Turn any completed audit into a white-label report with your agency’s name, colours and logo. Choose the sections, add notes for the client and save an unchangeable snapshot. Export to PDF, a self-contained HTML file or CSV.
- Executive summary, technical findings, broken-link priorities, GEO readiness, comparisons and an action plan
- Separate workspaces per agency, with Owner, Admin and Viewer roles enforced on the server
- Synthetic demo data can never appear in a client report
Availability
Where SEO Sentinel stands today
We’d rather you know the limits now than discover them later.
Available today
- The full interactive demo, with fictional data and no sign-up
- Beta access requests, reviewed individually
- Every feature described on this site, working in the beta build
Not available yet
- Public sign-up, paid plans or billing. Prices are not set
- JavaScript rendering, real-time monitoring or email alerts
- Automatic querying of AI platforms
Learn
Practical guides for technical SEO and GEO
Written for practitioners: how the problems arise, how to verify them and what to fix first.
How to find broken internal links and fix the right ones first
Find broken internal links with a crawl, separate real 404s from fetch failures, group them by destination and prioritise by linking pages and click depth.
Canonical tag issues: how to find and fix them
The canonical tag problems that matter: conflicts, canonicals to redirects, 404s or noindex pages, chains, header vs HTML mismatches, and what is intentional.
What is a GEO audit? AI-search readiness, explained
What a GEO (generative engine optimisation) audit can and cannot check: AI crawler access, content structure, entity consistency, sources and snippet controls.
Draft · under reviewAI crawlers and robots.txt: what each token controls
Which robots.txt tokens control AI search, AI training and user-triggered fetchers (GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended) and how to test them.
Draft · under reviewComparing SEO audits over time without misleading yourself
How to compare two technical SEO audits fairly: like-for-like crawl settings, stable issue identity, new vs resolved vs not re-checked, and coverage changes.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
Is SEO Sentinel available to buy?
Not yet. SEO Sentinel is in private beta: the application exists and is being tested, but it is not publicly available and billing is not active. You can request beta access and explore the full interface in the interactive demo today.
What is the interactive demo?
It is the real SEO Sentinel dashboard running in your browser with a fictional agency and fictional client websites. The audit data was produced by the real crawler against sample sites. Crawling, sign-in, billing and account changes are turned off, and nothing you do is saved.
Does SEO Sentinel track rankings in ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity automatically?
No. SEO Sentinel does not query or monitor any AI platform. You ask the AI tool your tracked questions yourself and record the answer; SEO Sentinel then analyses brand mentions, competitor mentions and citations in what you recorded. The demo also contains clearly labelled synthetic answers, which are never mixed with recorded data or included in client reports.
Does it render JavaScript?
No. The crawler reads the HTML the server returns. Content, links or structured data injected by JavaScript are not seen, and pages that look like empty JavaScript shells are flagged instead. For heavily client-rendered sites, use a rendering crawler alongside it.
How large a site can it audit?
In the dashboard, up to 1,000 URLs per audit. The proposed plans set lower per-audit limits (250 and 500 pages) on smaller tiers. SEO Sentinel is aimed at the small and medium-sized sites that most agencies and freelancers manage, not at enterprise-scale crawls.
Is monitoring real-time?
No. Monitoring runs audits on a schedule you choose: daily, weekly or monthly, at a set local time. Changes are reported when a scheduled audit completes, as notifications inside the dashboard. Email alerts are not available yet.
See the real dashboard before you ask for access
The interactive demo runs the actual SEO Sentinel interface on a fictional agency and fictional client websites. No sign-up, nothing to install.
SEO Sentinel is in private beta. Nothing is for sale yet and no card is ever requested.