Access and discovery
- Canonical response: the preferred URL returns HTTP 200 without a redirect chain.
- Robots policy: intended search and answer-engine crawlers are not accidentally blocked.
- Sitemap coverage: every indexable canonical page appears once in an XML sitemap.
- Internal discovery: valuable pages receive descriptive links from relevant hubs.
- Document readability: PDFs contain text or have accurate OCR; image-only evidence is not the sole source.
Verification: crawl from an external environment, record the final status and canonical, compare the inventory with the sitemap, and manually inspect representative documents.
Identity and provenance
- Publisher: the responsible organisation is visible and linked.
- Author: material content identifies a person or accountable editorial team.
- Expertise: biographies or review notes explain why contributors are qualified.
- Method: original research explains sample, collection period, exclusions, and limitations.
- Corrections: readers can identify material revisions or a correction policy.
Claim quality and sourcing
- Specific subjects: important statements name the organisation, market, product, or population.
- Units and periods: figures state what is measured and when.
- Adjacent sources: a primary source sits beside the claim it supports.
- Source quality: the link resolves to the original dataset, paper, filing, or official documentation where possible.
- Claim boundaries: estimates, forecasts, and observed facts are labelled differently.
Page structure and answer clarity
- Unique title: the title states the subject and user outcome.
- Descriptive H1: one primary heading matches the page purpose.
- Question-led sections: subheadings reflect the decisions readers need to make.
- Answer-sized passages: major questions receive a direct, self-contained response.
- Useful formats: comparisons use tables; sequences use ordered steps; definitions are explicit.
Metadata and machine-readable consistency
- Canonical tag: it is self-referential on the preferred URL.
- Description: it accurately describes the page rather than repeating a generic slogan.
- Article data: headline, author, publisher, and dates match visible content.
- Breadcrumb data: hierarchy is both visible and represented accurately.
- Social metadata: share title, description, URL, and image are complete.
Freshness, monitoring, and evidence of change
- Date integrity: published and modified dates reflect meaningful content changes.
- Reference health: material outbound sources still resolve and remain current.
- Snapshot history: score, page count, failures, and evidence changes are stored by date.
- Live query set: repeatable prompts cover branded, category, comparison, and evidence-seeking intent.
- Verification plan: every recommendation has an owner, target state, and retest.
How to prioritise the audit
Rank issues by business value, affected-page count, expected signal improvement, implementation effort, and confidence. Template-level fixes usually deserve priority because one change can repair many pages. Access failures outrank cosmetic improvements because inaccessible evidence cannot be retrieved at all.
Recommended output
For each issue, report the exact URLs, observed condition, target condition, owner, effort, evidence class, and recrawl test. That turns an audit into an implementation backlog.