The Technical Audit checks your key pages to see how ready they are to be read, understood, and cited by AI models. You add the pages you care about, Gumshoe also suggests pages worth auditing based on what your other audits have already found, and Gumshoe then runs a set of structured checks against each page. You get a score plus specific recommendations. Rerun the audit over time, and Gumshoe tracks the trend, so you can see whether the changes you made are moving the score in the right direction.
Do I need a subscription to use Technical Audit?
Technical Audit is available on Starter, Pro, and Custom projects. It isn't available on a Free Sample or a Sales Audit project. If you're on a Free Sample and want to use Technical Audit, upgrading your project to a subscription unlocks it.
What does the Technical Audit check?
The audit looks at pages through the lens of AI readiness, not classic SEO. Each page gets an overall AI Optimization Score (AIO) plus per-category scores in these areas:
- Structured Data Assessment: whether the page uses JSON-LD structured data and which schema types are in place.
- Page Layout Structure: heading hierarchy, semantic HTML, and how clearly the page is organized.
- Schema Markup: specific schema.org types (Organization, WebPage, Product, FAQ, Article) and how completely they're populated.
- Navigation: internal linking, URL structure, breadcrumbs, canonical tags, and hreflang.
- Content Balance: text-to-code ratio and how much meaningful content exists relative to markup.
- Metadata: title tags, meta descriptions, Open Graph, Twitter Card, and canonical URLs.
For every category, the audit surfaces Highlights (what's working) and Recommendations (what to fix).
Does the Technical Audit scan my whole site?
No. The Technical Audit works page by page rather than crawling your whole domain, so you choose which URLs it runs against. There is no whole-site crawl and no automatic sitemap import.
That is deliberate. Most sites are built from a handful of templates, so auditing one good example of each page type (home page, product page, article, FAQ, landing page) tells you nearly everything a full crawl would, and a fix at the template level usually moves every page built from it at once. Start with your key pages and the pages Gumshoe suggests, then add more URLs as you go.
Does the Technical Audit run automatically?
Only the first time. Gumshoe runs a Technical Audit on your starting page when your project is finalized. After that, scans are manual: a page is rescanned only when you add it again or click Reanalyze. Nothing rescans on a schedule, so you decide when runs happen and how often.
Does auditing my home page tell me more than auditing another page?
No. Every page is scanned against the same set of checks, and the home page is just the default starting point rather than a deeper analysis. Home pages often have more schema and metadata in place already, so the score can come out looking different, but the depth of the scan is the same.
The Key pages slots and the General pages field work the same way as each other too. A URL added to either one gets the same audit. The slots are there to help you organize your list, not to change what gets checked.
Where can I find the Technical Audit?
Open the project you want to check, then click Technical Audit in the left menu. From here, you can add pages, start audits, reanalyze, and archive. Scroll past your audited pages to see the pages Gumshoe suggests you audit next.
How do I add pages to the audit?
- Open Technical Audit in the left menu.
- Click Add pages in the top right.
- Fill in any of the Key pages slots (Home page, About page, Blog/News page, FAQ/Resources page) and add additional URLs under General pages. You can paste multiple URLs at once into a General pages field, for example a column copied straight from a spreadsheet, and Gumshoe will split them into separate fields automatically.
- Click Start page audits.
Leave any field blank if it doesn't apply. Each page runs through the audit, and once finished, it appears in the Active list with its score and last run date.
Does Gumshoe suggest pages for me to audit?
Yes. Below your audited pages, at the bottom of the Technical Audit page, Gumshoe lists suggested pages from your brand's domain that it has already encountered elsewhere in your project. The suggestions come from two places: pages on your domain that AI models cited in your latest Visibility Audit, and pages that picked up recommendations in your latest Content Audit.
Each suggested page shows how many content recommendations and how many citations Gumshoe has recorded for it, with the most cited pages listed first. That gives you a quick read on which of your pages AI models are already using, so you can prioritize the ones where a technical fix has the best chance of paying off.
You can add a suggested page straight to your audit from that list. If a suggested page is already in your audit, the option takes you to its existing results instead. Longer lists are shortened, with an option to reveal the rest.
Suggestions are built from audits that have already run, so a brand-new project won't have them yet, and the list refreshes as new citations and content recommendations come in. Treat it as a shortlist rather than a required list. You can still add any URL you want manually.
Can I add pages in bulk through the API or from a sitemap?
Not yet. The API is currently read-only and can't add pages. There's also no built-in way to fetch URLs automatically from a sitemap. Pasting a list of URLs into the General pages field, as described above, is the fastest bulk-add option available today, and the suggested pages list is the quickest way to add pages without typing them at all.
How do I read the score?
Scores run from 0 to 100 percent. Higher is better. Each score is paired with a rating: Poor, Fair, Good, or Very Good.
Treat scores as directional rather than precise. Some fluctuation between runs is normal, especially after smaller content changes. Focus on the trend over time and on the specific recommendations, rather than chasing a particular number.
What's on the Analysis overview page?
When you click any audited page from the Technical Audit list, you land on the Analysis overview. It shows every run for that one page on a single screen.
- Audit score trend: a line chart of how the score has changed across all runs.
- Audit history: a table with the date, score, and status of each run, plus a View results link for that run.
- Reanalyze: triggers a new run from this page.
Use the trend chart to see whether the changes you made are moving the score in the right direction. Click into any individual run for the full details.
What's on the Analysis results page?
Clicking View results on any run opens the Analysis results page. This is the per-run detail view. It shows:
- The AI Optimization Score (AIO) for the page on that run, with a short summary explaining the score.
- Per-category scores with Highlights and Recommendations for each.
- The exact date of the scan and the source URL the audit pulled from.
You can switch between past runs using the Scanned dropdown at the top right of the page, and between the two versions of the Technical Audit using the tabs above the results.
What's on the URL details page?
Click the page URL near the top of the Analysis results page to open URL details. This view gathers everything Gumshoe knows about that one URL across your whole project, not just its technical results:
- Technical audit history: every run for this URL by date, with the result from each version of the audit shown side by side, so you can see whether the page is improving or failing consistently.
- Citation history: how many times AI models cited this exact URL in your latest Visibility Audit run.
- Prompts that cited this URL: the prompts that produced those citations. Click any prompt to read the conversation it came from.
- Content audit references: any Content Audit recommendations that point at this URL.
Together these answer the question a technical score can't: whether this page is actually doing work for you in AI answers, and whether you already have content recommendations waiting on it. A page with citations behind it is usually the better place to spend a fix.
Click the link icon next to the URL at the top of the page to open the live page in a new tab.
Sections that have nothing to show say so, so a URL with no citations yet will tell you that rather than appearing blank.
How do I rerun or archive a page?
To rerun an audit, click Reanalyze on the Analysis overview. You can also click the three-dot menu next to the URL on the Technical Audit page and pick Reanalyze.
To archive a page, click the three-dot menu next to the URL on the Technical Audit page and pick Archive. Archived pages move to the Archived tab and can be restored later.
For more detail on rerunning audits, see the article How do I refresh my Technical Audit?
What does a Failed status mean?
A Failed status indicates that Gumshoe couldn't obtain a clean read of the page after multiple retries. A failed run produces no score at all rather than a low one, because the on-page checks never got the chance to run. The page will show no overall score for that run.
Open the failed run to see what happened. Gumshoe lists every crawl attempt it made, what went wrong each time, and how long each attempt took before giving up, along with a Reanalyze button so you can try again once the problem is fixed. Common reasons:
- The page redirected to a different URL, which Gumshoe flags as a suspicious redirect. This is the most common failure and usually the easiest to fix. The detail for each attempt names the address the URL was sent to, so if that destination is the page you wanted scanned, add it to your Technical Audit and it will run normally. For the full walkthrough, see our article on crawlability failures.
- The site blocks crawlers.
- The page requires login.
- A CDN or firewall (like Cloudflare's AI bot blocking) is rejecting the request.
- The URL is non-standard, like Google.com, which blocks crawlers by design.