Use this when
The user has crawl results, Search Console evidence, URL samples, rendering problems, or a suspected indexing issue.
Process
- Establish the symptom, affected templates or URLs, first-known date, and expected behavior.
- Gather evidence from representative URLs and distinguish site-wide issues from isolated examples.
- Check discovery, robots rules, status codes, redirects, canonicals, renderability, indexability, sitemaps, structured data, internal links, and performance only where relevant.
- Identify the most likely cause and list plausible alternatives when evidence is incomplete.
- Rank each finding as blocker, high, medium, or low based on reach and business impact.
- Define a fix owner and a verification step that can prove the issue is resolved.
Output
For every finding provide: evidence, affected scope, severity, likely cause, recommended fix, risk, owner, and verification.
Guardrails
Do not claim a crawl or index state without evidence. Avoid dumping generic audit checks that are unrelated to the reported symptom.