Technical & Structured Data Launch Checklist

Two different kinds of “technical readiness”

This guide covers two things that get bundled together because they're both invisible to a visual review: the plumbing that keeps a site secure and working correctly (HTTPS, security headers, a real 404 page, no console errors), and the structured data that tells search engines and AI answer engines what's actually on the page, beyond what a human reader sees.

The plumbing checks

HTTPS is non-negotiable at this point — browsers actively warn visitors away from plain HTTP, and it caps your score regardless of anything else. Beyond that: security headers (a small set of HTTP response headers that tell the browser how to treat your content defensively), no mixed content (an HTTPS page quietly loading an image or script over plain HTTP, which browsers block or flag), a custom 404 page instead of a bare server error, and a console with no thrown JavaScript errors on page load.

The structured data checks

Structured data (schema.org markup, usually as JSON-LD) is a machine-readable summary of your page — what organization runs it, what product it's selling, what the breadcrumb trail is. Search engines use it for rich results; AI systems that answer questions by reading live pages use it to understand a page's content faster and more reliably than parsing prose. We also check whether AI-crawler user agents are allowed to read your public pages at all, and whether an llms.txt file exists — an emerging, not-yet-universal convention for pointing AI systems at a clean summary of your site.

Common mistakes we see

• No security headers at all. Easy to miss because the page works identically with or without them — the difference only shows up if something tries to exploit their absence.
• A generic hosting-provider 404 page. Functional, but a missed chance to route a lost visitor back into the site instead of losing them at a dead end.
• Duplicate or conflicting schema markup. Two different Organization blocks with different details, left over from a redesign that added new markup without removing the old.
• No breadcrumb markup on content pages. A missed, low-effort win for how search results display your page hierarchy.
• AI-search crawlers blocked by a blanket robots.txt rule. Often accidental — a broad Disallow rule written for one bot ends up catching AI answer-engine crawlers too.

How to check it yourself

Check that your site loads over HTTPS with no browser warning, then open your browser's console on your homepage and confirm there are no red errors. Validate your structured data with Google's Rich Results Test, and visit a nonsense URL on your own domain to see what your 404 page actually looks like.