A page can only rank if Google can reach it, read it, and store it. We check that chain on your site, find where it breaks, and hand you a fix list in the order that matters. No jargon dump, no 300 page export you will never open.
Search works in a fixed order. Google has to crawl the page, then index it, then decide where it ranks. Skip a step and nothing after it happens. A site can have excellent content and still earn nothing if the first link in that chain is broken.
Googlebot has to be able to request the page and get a clean 200 response back. A robots.txt rule, a server error, or a redirect loop stops it here.
Google reads the page and decides whether to store it. A stray noindex tag, a canonical pointing somewhere else, or thin duplicated copy stops it here.
Only now does content quality, links, and relevance come into play. Most SEO advice you read starts at this step and assumes the first two are fine.
Google states this plainly in its crawling documentation: if a page is not crawled it cannot be indexed, and if it is not indexed it cannot rank. Source: Google Search Central, Crawl Budget Management.
Eight areas cover almost everything that stops a site being found. Each one is checked by hand as well as by tool, because crawlers miss context and context is where most real problems sit.
Whether search engines can reach your pages at all, and whether anything is blocking scripts or styles the page needs to render properly.
Stray noindex tags, canonical tags pointing at the wrong URL, and pages sitting in Search Console as discovered but never stored.
How many clicks it takes to reach an important page, and whether any pages have no links pointing to them at all.
Chains where one redirect points to another, links to pages that no longer exist, and old URLs left behind after a rebuild.
Loading, responsiveness, and layout stability measured against the thresholds Google publishes, on real devices rather than lab scores alone.
What the page looks like to a phone-sized crawler, including content hidden, cut off, or loaded only after a tap.
Whether your markup is valid, whether it matches what is visible on the page, and whether it is earning anything.
Certificate setup, mixed content warnings, sitemap accuracy, and how quickly your server answers the first request.
Google publishes three numbers. They are not a secret and they are not negotiable at the top end. These are the thresholds a page needs to hit for the good rating, measured on real visits rather than a test lab.
How long until the main thing on the page has loaded. Usually a hero image, a heading, or a background.
How quickly the page reacts when someone taps or clicks. Slow scripts are the usual cause.
How much the page jumps about while loading. Images with no set size and late loading fonts are common culprits.
Thresholds taken from Google’s Core Web Vitals documentation. You will see claims that these numbers changed in 2026. Google’s own pages still show the figures above, so those are the ones we work to.
Usually not, and any agency telling a ten page site it has a crawl budget crisis is selling something. Here is what Google actually says, and when it does start to matter.
Google says that if your pages tend to get crawled the same day you publish them, you do not need the crawl budget guide at all. Keeping your sitemap current and checking the index coverage report is enough. That covers the large majority of small business sites in the UK.
Larger sites, and especially shops with filter and sort links, can generate thousands of near identical URLs. Google flags this by putting a lot of pages into the discovered but not currently indexed bucket. That is the signal worth acting on, not a number in a tool.
Both points are from Google Search Central, Crawl Budget Management.
Yes, but not in the way most of the market is selling it. In May 2026 Google published its first proper guidance on generative AI features and included a mythbusting section. Several popular services were named as things you do not need.
| Commonly sold as essential | What Google actually says |
|---|---|
| An llms.txt file | Not used by Google Search. John Mueller compared it to the old keywords meta tag. An Ahrefs study of 137,000 sites found 97 percent of these files were never requested by any bot, and AI crawlers never went looking for one where it did not exist. |
| Chopping content into small chunks | There is no requirement to break content into tiny pieces and no ideal page length. Google says its systems handle several topics on one page and show the relevant part. |
| Special schema markup for AI | Structured data is not required for generative AI search and there is no special markup to add. It is still worth keeping for rich results in ordinary search. |
| FAQ schema for rich snippets | FAQ rich results stopped appearing in Google Search from 7 May 2026. The markup no longer earns the snippet. Clear answers on the page still help people and still get read. |
What does carry weight is unglamorous. Google describes its AI features as rooted in the same ranking and quality systems that decide ordinary results. They pull from the same index. So a site that loads quickly, can be crawled without obstruction, has a clear heading structure, and says something specific enough to be worth quoting will do better across both. That is the same work as fixing the technical layer properly.
Sources: Google Search Central, optimising for generative AI features, and the Ahrefs llms.txt study, June 2026.
A findings document written so a business owner can read it and a developer can work from it. Every item says what is wrong, why it matters, and what to do.
Everything found, sorted by likely impact against effort. The top of the list is where to start on Monday morning.
Screenshots, crawl data, and the URL affected. Nothing on the list is there because a tool coloured it red.
Two pages you can read without a background in search. Useful if you need to get budget signed off by someone else.
The specific file, tag, or setting to change. Your existing developer can pick it up without a handover call.
We go through the findings together so you can ask why, not just what. Recorded if you want to share it internally.
An agreed date to look again after the fixes land, so you can see what moved and what did not.
Four stages, and you hear from us at each one. Most sites are done inside two weeks from the point we get access.
We agree what is in scope, then get read access to Search Console and Analytics. If you do not have Search Console set up we will do that first, because without it we are guessing.
We crawl the site the way a search engine would, pull field data on speed, and check how the pages render on a phone. Server logs too where you can supply them.
The part tools cannot do. We look at what the crawl flagged, work out which items are real problems on your site rather than generic warnings, and discard the noise.
You get the document, then we talk it through. From there you can hand it to your developer, or we can quote to do the work.
Price follows site size, because a fifteen page brochure site and a two thousand product shop are not the same job. We will tell you which one you are before quoting.
A short look at the things that break sites most often. Indexing status, whether anything is blocking crawling, a speed reading, and mobile rendering. You get the findings whether or not you go further.
The whole checklist, done by hand, with the report and walkthrough call. We quote after the free check because by then we know what we are dealing with.
Optional. Plenty of clients take the report to their own developer, which is fine. If you would rather we did the work, it is priced on the list.
We audit sites for businesses across the UK, and the work is the same wherever you are because search engines do not care about your postcode. Our business partner is based in County Durham, so a fair share of our work sits in the North East corridor.
Audits run remotely. You do not need us in the room, and most clients would rather have the report than a meeting. If you are nearby and would prefer to go through the findings face to face, that can be arranged.
Straight answers to the things people ask before they commit. If yours is not here, ask us.
Most sites take one to two weeks from the point we have access. A small brochure site can be quicker. A large shop with thousands of product URLs takes longer, mainly because the crawl itself takes longer and there is more to sort through by hand.
Once a year is sensible for most businesses, plus any time something big changes. A redesign, a platform move, a hosting change, or a sudden drop in traffic are all good reasons to look sooner. Between audits, checking Search Console monthly catches most new problems early.
You can get a long way with free tools. Search Console will show you indexing problems, and PageSpeed Insights will show you speed. The hard part is not finding issues, it is working out which ones actually matter on your site. Crawl tools flag hundreds of things that are harmless.
A technical audit looks at whether search engines can reach, read and store your pages. A full SEO audit adds content quality, keyword targeting, and links. Technical comes first, because the rest of it cannot work if the foundation is broken.
Rarely. Fixing crawling and indexing problems removes what was holding pages back, but Google still has to recrawl and reassess. Expect weeks rather than days. Speed fixes can show up faster because field data updates on a rolling basis.
Yes, and it is the single most valuable time to have one. Redirects from old URLs, pages that quietly did not make the move, and staging settings left switched on are the three things that most often cost traffic after a rebuild.
The checklist is the same but the common faults differ. On WordPress we look closely at plugin conflicts, tag and author archive pages that nobody needs indexed, image sizes served straight from the media library, and caching that is either missing or fighting itself.
No. Google has said it does not use the file, and research across 137,000 sites found almost all of them were never requested by any bot. If someone is charging you for one as an AI visibility service, that is worth questioning.
No. It affects how quickly and how thoroughly your pages get crawled and indexed, which matters, but it is not a signal Google uses to decide position. For most small sites it is not a concern at all.
A crawler to map the site, Search Console for how Google actually sees it, and Google’s own speed tooling for field data. The tools do the collecting. The judgement about what matters is done by a person, which is the part that decides whether a report is useful or just long.
An audit tells you what is wrong. These are the pages covering the work that fixes it.
Send us your web address. We will run the free initial check and tell you what we find, in plain terms, whether or not you take it further.