The mechanical part
Part of technical SEO is simply consistently deriving something from what already exists. That belongs in the build, not a checklist. Every Gen8 site publication generates:
sitemap.xmlcontaining only published pages withoutnoindex;robots.txt, allowing AI crawlers;llms.txtand an RSS feed;- canonical links per page and language alternatives (hreflang) between translations;
- structured data:
BlogPostingfor article collections,TechArticlefor documentation,Articlefor the rest.
One condition is yours to meet: that markup requires a title and publication date. An article without a date falls outside structured data, unnoticed until you miss it.
What goes wrong automatically if left unchecked
Three things are technically automatable yet a bad idea to generate without supervision:
- Bulk titles and meta descriptions. A model produces polished, interchangeable sentences. Fifty pages with polished interchangeable sentences compete with each other and collectively say nothing. Generate a proposal and let a person decide what makes each page unique.
- Internal links. A generated link to a nonexistent page breaks on publication. A generated link to an existing but irrelevant page breaks nothing and helps nobody. Internal links deserve the same attention as their surrounding paragraph.
- Alt text. Describing what an image shows is automatable; why the image is there is not. Never generate alt text from a filename, and leave it empty for purely decorative images.
The boundary
A useful summary: what follows from structure may be automatic; what concerns meaning receives editorial judgment. A sitemap follows from structure. A title concerns meaning. Hreflang follows from structure. Choosing which page gets noindex concerns meaning — and is also the setting most often left on accidentally.
What this does not solve
A clean technical foundation makes you discoverable. Discoverable is not the same as ranking well. No generation step guarantees a position; that depends on how specific your content is and links other sites give you. Treat technical SEO as the whole project and in six months you have a technically impeccable site nobody visits.
What to check periodically
Three questions, a few times yearly: does the sitemap include something that should not be there or omit something that should; do new pages have their own titles and descriptions rather than variations on the previous one; and is noindex still correct on pages carrying it? Fifteen minutes catches most issues.