Technical SEO in 2026 goes beyond the basics of sitemaps and robots.txt. With Core Web Vitals as a confirmed ranking factor, AI crawlers accessing your content, and structured data becoming essential for rich results, here's what your technical SEO checklist should include.
Core Web Vitals
We hold every site we build to LCP under 1.5 seconds, CLS under 0.05 and TTFB under 200ms. Hilton Bradley went from a Lighthouse performance score of 48 to 100 when we hit those numbers.
Structured data
Add JSON-LD for your organisation, services, FAQs, articles and breadcrumbs. This helps both traditional search engines and AI models understand your content. Use our Schema Validator to check your implementation.
AI crawlers and llms.txt
Create an llms.txt file (similar to robots.txt) that provides structured information about your business for AI crawlers. This emerging standard helps LLMs accurately represent your brand. This is a key component of any GEO strategy.
Crawlability
Ensure your site is fully crawlable by both traditional search engine bots and AI crawlers. Check your robots.txt for overly restrictive rules, ensure your sitemap.xml is complete and up-to-date, and verify that your internal linking structure allows crawlers to discover all important content.
Security headers
Implement HSTS, Content Security Policy, X-Frame-Options and other security headers. HTTPS is a confirmed lightweight ranking signal, and the headers protect your visitors on top of it.
Ongoing audits
Finally, conduct regular technical audits. Set up automated monitoring for Core Web Vitals, broken links, and crawl errors. We re-crawl client sites monthly, because a plugin update can undo a fix overnight.
Want us to run this checklist on your site? Try our GEO Readiness Checker or contact us for a full assessment.
