Proof you can inspect. Limits you can see.

If a search or answer engine's crawler is disallowed in robots.txt, that engine cannot read your pages and you become invisible to its results — including AI answer surfaces that are sending an increasing share of buying traffic.

A noindex directive tells engines not to list the page at all. On a homepage this removes you from results entirely — a silent, total loss of organic and AI-answer visibility.

An X-Robots-Tag noindex header suppresses the page in search and answer engines even when the HTML looks fine — a common, easily-missed misconfiguration that quietly removes you from results.

Different engines use different bots. A site can be visible to Google yet invisible to ChatGPT or Perplexity. The matrix shows exactly which buying-intent surfaces can and cannot reach you.

Complete Article schema improves how content is attributed and surfaced in search and AI answers, helping your expertise get cited rather than a competitor's.

Breadcrumb rich results make your search listing clearer and more navigable, lifting click-through. An empty BreadcrumbList contributes nothing.

FAQ schema can win extra real estate in results and is a strong source for AI answer engines. An FAQPage with no mainEntity produces nothing.

A LocalBusiness block missing name, address, or phone is present-but-ineligible: Google will not render the rich result, so you lose the map pack and knowledge-panel surfaces that drive local bookings.

Broken JSON-LD is silently ignored by search engines — the effort you spent adding schema delivers zero benefit because none of it is read.

Without JSON-LD the page cannot qualify for any Google rich result and gives AI answer engines no machine-readable description of your business — you are harder to find and harder to cite.

Organization schema with a logo feeds the knowledge panel and brand recognition in search and AI answers. Missing it weakens how engines identify and represent your brand.

Product schema without price or availability cannot show the price/stock rich result, so the listing misses the click-through advantage of products that display their price directly in results.

Schema that uses only unsupported types earns no rich result. Pointing it at a supported type is usually a small change with a visible payoff in results.

An anchor with no href is not a keyboard-focusable link, so keyboard and screen-reader users cannot reach what is meant to be clickable.

Obsolete tags signal an aging template and can render inconsistently in modern browsers, a small but real credibility tax.

Duplicate ids break label/for associations, in-page anchors, and scripts, which can silently disable form fields or navigation that customers rely on.

Empty headings confuse the document outline and assistive tech, often a side effect of styling hacks that quietly degrade accessibility.

Images without alt text are invisible to screen-reader users and to image search, costing both accessibility and a discovery channel.

Without a declared language, screen readers and search engines cannot reliably determine the page language, hurting both accessibility and how the page is indexed for the right audience.

Without an explicit character encoding, special characters and currency symbols can render as garbled text, eroding trust at a glance.

The title labels the page in browser tabs, search results, and shared links. With no title, every one of those surfaces shows nothing useful and click-through suffers.

Without a viewport tag, mobile browsers do not scale the layout correctly, so the site can render zoomed-out and unusable on phones — where most local buyers arrive.

Several competing <h1>s blur the document outline, making it less clear to engines and assistive tech which message is primary.

A single top-level heading anchors the document outline for assistive tech and search engines. No <h1> leaves both without a clear sense of what the page is about.

A certificate that lapses takes the whole site offline behind a security warning. The expiry countdown is the single highest-retention monitoring signal — it lets you fix it before customers ever see a failure.

An invalid certificate triggers a full-page browser security warning that stops most visitors cold — the highest-severity, most immediate revenue leak on the list.

Missing security headers leave the site more exposed to clickjacking, MIME-sniffing, and injection attacks, and they drag down trust/security scoring that some buyers and partners check.

A p=none DMARC policy reports spoofing but blocks nothing. Spoofed mail still reaches inboxes, so the protection is only partial until the policy is tightened.

With no DMARC record, anyone can send email that appears to come from your domain. That enables phishing of your own customers and pushes your legitimate mail toward spam folders.

SPF tells receiving servers which hosts may send mail for your domain. Without it, more of your legitimate email lands in spam and spoofing is easier.

These trackers can fingerprint visitors and share data across sites. Running them with no consent gate materially raises GDPR/CCPA exposure compared with first-party analytics.

A consent banner is good, but a banner that loads while trackers still fire before opt-in is not real protection. This rule prompts you to verify the gate actually works.

Non-essential cookies set before opt-in are a classic ePrivacy violation. A high pre-consent cookie count is a clear, countable red flag.

Loading analytics or advertising trackers before consent is a GDPR/ePrivacy risk for EU/UK visitors — a real, articulable compliance gap that can carry fines and erode trust.

You can't measure what you can't see. With no analytics tag, you have no visibility into traffic, conversions, or where visitors drop off — every revenue decision is a guess.

Knowing the underlying platform sets realistic expectations for what each fix costs and how it must be implemented, so the recommendations are grounded in your actual stack.

A declared language helps engines serve the page to the right regional audience and improves assistive-tech pronunciation.

A canonical tag tells engines which URL is the real one, preventing duplicate-content dilution across www/non-www and tracking-parameter variants.

Schema is how engines and AI answer surfaces understand your business in machine-readable form. None present means they fall back to guessing from raw text.

A noindex homepage is removed from search results entirely. It is the most severe SEO finding because no other optimization matters if the page cannot be listed.

With no meta description, engines auto-generate the snippet under your listing, surrendering control of the pitch that drives the click.

Titles that are too short or too long get truncated or read as thin in results, leaving click-through on the table.

The title is the headline of your search listing. Missing it means search engines invent one or show the URL, sharply lowering click-through.