The pre-launch indexability audit: catch issues before Google does

Launch days are messy. Designers want to ship, marketing wants to announce, and SEO is the last person anyone wants to hear from. But every indexability bug you catch before launch is a bug you don't have to apologize for at the next standup.

The pre-launch audit list

Run the Indexability Audit on each of these on the staging or production URL (whichever Google will see first):

• Homepage
• Top 3 marketing landing pages
• Top 3 blog posts you're migrating
• One representative product / docs / case study page
• Sitemap.xml URL itself (it should be fetchable and well-formed)
• Robots.txt URL itself

What the audit checks

• HTTP status (200, 301, 404, 5xx)
• Canonical tag presence and target
• Robots meta directives (index/noindex, follow/nofollow)
• Title tag, meta description, OG tags
• Structured data validity
• PageSpeed (LCP, CLS, TTFB) — Core Web Vitals are a real ranking factor
• URL Inspection verdict from Google

Post-launch follow-up

1. Submit your sitemap in Search Console.
2. Push the top 50 URLs through the Indexing API immediately ($9.99 pack).
3. Run status checks 24 and 72 hours later.
4. Re-audit any URL that returns an unexpected verdict.