Technical SEO Checklist: What To Keep, Check, And Add

If you set up your website's technical SEO a few years ago and haven't touched it since, you may need to update a few things. Here's why: search used to mean one thing, Google, so your technical SEO was built to satisfy Google's search engine and others like it.

That's still happening. But there's a second reader now too.

Tools like ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews, and Perplexity are pulling information from the same websites Google indexes, and using it to answer questions directly. That means when someone asks one of these tools to recommend a business like yours, it's checking whether your website is set up to be read this way in the first place. 

So technical SEO now has two audiences to satisfy: search engines and AI systems. The reassuring part is that they overlap a lot. Your current technical SEO foundation is enough; you just need to check it's covering both.

That's what this checklist is for. We've split it into three parts: what to keep doing, what to double-check, and what to add if you haven't already.

Part 1: What to keep in your technical SEO checklist

These are the basic building blocks of technical SEO.  Have a quick look and see if they're already in place. If they are, you're in good shape; just keep them maintained. If not, this is the best place to start.

 1. A clear website structure

Search engines and AI tools both need to be able to find their way around your site easily. A good structure works like a simple filing system: 

• Your homepage at the top, 
• Main category pages below it 
• Then individual pages underneath those. 

Ideally, any page on your site should be reachable within three or four clicks from your homepage.

If your site has grown organically over the years and pages feel scattered or buried, that's worth a look.

2. Sitemaps

A sitemap is essentially a map of your website that you hand to search engines, so they don't have to guess how your pages connect. Most website platforms generate one automatically. Check that yours exists, is up to date, and has been submitted through Google Search Console.

Note: If you're redesigning your website or restructuring its content, always redirect your old URLs to the new ones. Otherwise, search engine bots will experience broken links, which might affect your site's user experience.

3. HTTPS

If your website address starts with "https" rather than "http," you're covered. This is the secure version of your site, and it's non-negotiable now, both for user trust and for search visibility. If you haven't upgraded, this is the one item on this list we'd call urgent.

4. Internal links

Internal links are the links between pages on your own website, for example a blog post linking to your services page. They help visitors find related content, and they help search engines understand which pages on your site matter most. Every so often, it's worth checking that these links actually work and aren't pointing to pages that no longer exist.

Quick tip: Not sure where your site currently stands on any of this? Running a proper technical audit is the fastest way to see exactly what's missing before you start working through this checklist. Our guide on tools for conducting a thorough technical SEO audit walks through how to do one.

Part 2: What to double-check

These are core to your technical SEO, and they're worth checking now. The standards behind them have changed since you last set them up, so what passed a few years ago might not pass today.

1. Core web vitals

Core Web Vitals are a set of three measurements Google uses to judge how a page feels to use: how fast it loads, how quickly it responds when someone taps or clicks something, and how much it jumps around visually while loading. If you've heard of this before, you may recognise the first and third, but the middle one has changed.

Here's where things stand now:

• Loading speed (LCP): your main content should appear within 2.5 seconds. If yours is slower, our guide on how to speed up your website walks through why it matters and where to start.
• Responsiveness (INP): your site should respond to a click or tap within 200 milliseconds. This replaced an older measurement called First Input Delay, which was retired in 2024.
• Visual stability (CLS): elements on the page shouldn't jump around as it loads. Aim for a stability score under 0.1.

If your previous technical SEO work referenced "First Input Delay," that's the piece that's now out of date. The other two haven't changed. You can check where your site currently stands using one of these free website speed testing tools.

2. Robots.txt

Your robots.txt file tells search engines which parts of your website they're allowed to look at. It's a small text file, but it's one of the first things any crawler checks when it arrives at your site.

This still works exactly the way it always has for Google and Bing. What's new is that AI tools use their own crawlers too, with their own names, and they check the same file. If your robots.txt file was set up before AI search existed, it's worth having someone check whether it's accidentally blocking these newer crawlers from seeing your content, especially if you'd like your business to show up in AI-generated answers.

Part 3: What to add if you haven't already in technical SEO

This is where technical SEO has genuinely expanded. Neither of these was standard practice a few years ago, but both are now core to how AI systems read, trust, and surface your content.

1. Schema markup

Schema markup is a bit of code added to your website that explains what your content actually is, in a language machines understand. Without it, a search engine or AI tool has to guess whether a page is a blog post, a product, a review, or something else. With it, you're telling them directly, including specifics like your business name, the type of page, dates, and other key facts.

It won't directly boost your ranking, but it does two things that matter. 

1. It can earn your listing extra space on the search results page, like star ratings or event details showing up before someone even clicks. 
2. And it makes it much easier for AI tools to pull accurate information about your business rather than guessing and getting it wrong.

You don't need every type of schema, just the ones relevant to your business. The most common ones worth having are:

• Organisation (your business details)
• Product (if you sell products)
• Article (for blog posts)
• Review (if you collect customer reviews)

You won't need to write this yourself; it's a job for whoever maintains your website. But it's worth knowing it exists and asking whether it's set up, since it's one of the more meaningful additions to technical SEO in recent years.

2.  AI crawler access

This ties back to the robots.txt point above, but it deserves its own mention. If part of your goal is showing up in AI tools like ChatGPT or Google's AI Overviews, those tools need to actually be able to access your site to learn about your business. That's not automatic. Checking that your site isn't unintentionally blocking these crawlers is a quick, one-time task that's easy to overlook simply because it didn't exist as a consideration until recently.

Google algorithm and updates

Google updates its algorithm constantly, not once or twice a year, but hundreds of times. Most of these are minor and go unnoticed. But a few times a year, Google rolls out larger updates, including ones aimed specifically at spam and low-quality sites.

When one of these spam-focused updates lands, a lot of websites lose rankings or traffic overnight. It's rarely random. Most of the time, it's because the site's technical setup, its content, or both, hadn't been kept up to date, and the update simply caught up with it.

There's no way to predict exactly when these updates will hit or which sites they'll affect. But keeping an eye on major Google announcements and checking your site still holds up against them is one of the simplest ways to avoid getting caught out.

The takeaway

None of this means starting over. If you've already invested in a solid, well-structured, fast, secure website, you're most of the way there already. The changes that matter are specific and manageable.

Think of this less as a new checklist and more as an update to the one you already had. Keep what's working, check the couple of things that quietly moved, and add the one or two pieces that are new. That's enough to keep your website working for both the search engines you already know, and the AI tools your customers are increasingly starting to use.

Need a hand with this?

Updating your technical SEO and then tracking whether it's actually making a difference can be a lot to take on, especially alongside running your business. You don't have to work through this checklist alone.

At Digital Treasury, we handle the technical side end to end, from the initial audit through to tracking the results, so you can see what's working without having to become an SEO expert yourself. Get in touch, and we'll take it from here.