Technical SEO & AIvisibility foundations

Crawlability refers to how effectively search engines can discover and navigate your website.

Search engines rely on crawlers to access pages, follow internal links and understand site structure. Poor crawlability can prevent important pages from being indexed properly, while inefficient crawl paths can waste crawl budget and reduce how frequently critical content is revisited.

Common crawlability issues include broken internal links, orphaned pages, incorrect robots directives, JavaScript rendering problems, duplicate URLs, redirect chains and inconsistent canonicalisation. Strong technical SEO helps create clear pathways for search engines and AI systems to efficiently access and interpret your content.

Related expertise:

• Indexation optimisation
• Website architecture
• Technical SEO audits

Even strong content and large marketing investments can underperform if technical foundations are weak.

Technical issues can prevent search engines from properly crawling or indexing pages, dilute authority signals through duplication, slow down rendering, weaken internal linking structures or reduce user experience through poor performance. These issues often limit discoverability before broader SEO or content strategies have a chance to succeed.

Technical SEO also increasingly influences how businesses appear across AI-powered search experiences. Structured understanding, clear entities and strong site architecture help machines interpret content more accurately, improving visibility across both traditional and emerging search environments.

Related expertise:

• Crawlability & indexation
• Page speed & Core Web Vitals
• Website architecture

A technical SEO audit is a detailed review of the underlying technical factors affecting search visibility and discoverability.

At Submerge, technical audits examine areas including crawlability, rendering, site architecture, structured data, duplicate content, page speed, Core Web Vitals, internal linking, canonicals, XML sitemaps, robots directives and indexation behaviour. We also assess how effectively search engines and AI systems can interpret the structure and meaning of a website.

The goal is not simply to produce a checklist of technical issues. A strong technical audit prioritises the problems most likely to affect visibility, user experience and long-term search performance.

Here are some of the activities and tasks Submerge carries out as part of a technical SEO audit.

Crawl analysis

A comprehensive crawl of the website is performed using tools like Screaming Frog SEO Spider, Ahrefs or SEMrush. This analysis helps identify crawl errors, broken links, redirect chains, and orphan pages. It also assesses the site’s URL structure, ensuring it’s logical and search engine friendly.

Site structure

The audit examines the site’s hierarchy and structure, ensuring it is organized in a way that is logical and easy to navigate for both users and search engine bots. A well-structured website helps search engines understand the site’s content hierarchy and the relationship between pages.

Speed and performance optimisation

Page speed is a critical ranking factor. Tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix are used to analyse the loading times of pages and identify factors that may be slowing the site down, such as unoptimised images, slow server response times and bulky code.

Mobile responsiveness

With the advent of mobile-first indexing, ensuring your website is mobile-friendly is non-negotiable. This part of the audit checks the site’s responsiveness across various devices and screen sizes, identifying any issues that might affect the user experience on mobile.

Security

Security plays a significant role in the trustworthiness of a site. An audit will check for HTTPS implementation, secure data transmission and any potential security vulnerabilities that could compromise the website or user data.

On-page SEO evaluation

Though primarily technical, the audit also briefly touches on on-page elements to ensure proper use of tags (title, meta descriptions, headings), content quality, and keyword optimisation. It ensures that these elements are correctly implemented to support the site’s SEO strategy.

Indexation analysis

This involves checking the site’s index status on search engines to ensure that all important pages are being indexed properly and no unnecessary pages are consuming the crawl budget. It includes reviewing the robots.txt file, sitemap.xml files, and the use of noindex tags.

Duplicate Content and canonicalisation

The audit identifies duplicate content issues and ensures proper use of canonical tags to tell search engines which versions of similar pages should be considered the “master” pages. This prevents the dilution of ranking signals.

Structured data

Reviewing and implementing structured data (Schema.org) helps search engines understand the content of your site and can enhance visibility in search results through rich snippets. The audit checks for the correct implementation of structured data.

Link health analysis

Examines the health and quality of internal and external links, identifying broken links, improper redirects, and opportunities to improve the internal linking structure to distribute page authority throughout the site.

Reporting

The culmination of a technical SEO audit is a detailed report highlighting the findings, including issues impacting the site’s performance and specific recommendations for resolving these issues. Our report serves as a roadmap for making technical optimisations that can significantly improve the site’s SEO performance.

Our team performs regular technical SEO audits to ensure that your website remains compliant with search engine guidelines, is competitive in the ever-evolving landscape of SEO and provides a superior experience to its users.

Structured data is machine-readable code added to a website to help search engines and AI systems better understand content and entities.

Schema markup provides additional context about businesses, products, services, reviews, articles, events and other types of content. This can support enhanced search features such as rich snippets, FAQs, knowledge panels and other expanded search experiences.

As AI-driven search evolves, structured data is becoming increasingly important for helping machines interpret relationships between content, entities and topics. While schema alone will not guarantee rankings or AI visibility, it strengthens the clarity and structure of information across your site.

Related expertise:

• Entity & schema optimisation
• Structured data implementation
• AI & LLM visibility

Core Web Vitals are Google’s performance metrics designed to measure user experience factors such as loading speed, visual stability and responsiveness.

Poor Core Web Vitals can affect engagement, conversion rates and search visibility, particularly on mobile devices. Slow-loading pages increase bounce rates and reduce the likelihood of users engaging with content or completing enquiries.

Improving Core Web Vitals often involves reducing unnecessary scripts, optimising assets, improving caching, refining front-end rendering and strengthening hosting infrastructure. Technical SEO and performance optimisation work together to create faster, more resilient websites.

Related expertise:

• Page speed & Core Web Vitals
• Website performance optimisation
• Technical SEO audits

AI is reshaping how search engines and digital platforms interpret and surface content.

Large language models and AI-powered search experiences increasingly rely on structured understanding, semantic clarity, entities and machine-readable signals when referencing businesses online. This means technical SEO now extends beyond traditional rankings to support broader discoverability across AI systems.

Modern technical SEO increasingly overlaps with AI visibility through structured data, topical relationships, entity optimisation, crawl accessibility and scalable information architecture. Businesses with clearer technical signals are often better positioned for AI-driven discovery.

Related expertise:

• AI & LLM visibility
• Entity & schema optimisation
• Search & AI strategy

Strong technical foundations can help improve how AI systems interpret and reference your business online.

AI-powered platforms rely heavily on structured understanding and contextual relationships when surfacing information. Technical clarity helps machines better understand your business, services, expertise and topical authority.

Technical SEO alone is not enough to guarantee AI visibility. However, combining strong technical infrastructure with authoritative content, clear entity signals, structured data and broader digital authority creates stronger foundations for discoverability across AI-powered search environments.

Related expertise:

• AI visibility audits
• Structured data strategy
• Technical SEO & AI foundations