Technical suggestions
The Technical spoke is for the engineering changes that make your site easier for AI crawlers to understand. These are the unglamorous but high-leverage fixes — schema markup, FAQ blocks, semantic HTML — that often unblock a ton of visibility at once.
Two sources, one page
Technical Suggestions combines two data sources:
- Scan DataPatterns Scout sees in AI responses themselves. For example, if Perplexity is consistently citing competitor FAQ pages and you don't have FAQs, that's a Scan Data recommendation.
- AI Audit (Premium)Recommendations from the AI Audit Agent, which actually crawls your live site and runs it through Claude for technical analysis.
You can filter the page by source: All / AI Audit / Scan Data.
Common recommendation types
| Type | Why it matters for AI |
|---|---|
FAQ schema (FAQPage) | AI engines extract Q&A pairs and quote them directly. |
Article schema (Article / BlogPosting) | Helps AI confidently attribute quotes to your domain. |
Product schema (Product, Offer) | Lets AI surface accurate prices, ratings, availability. |
| Organisation schema | Establishes the canonical name, logo, and description of your brand. |
Semantic HTML (proper <h1>, <article>, <section>) | AI parsers rely on structure when no schema is present. |
| Robots.txt allow rules for AI bots | Some sites accidentally block GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot — Scout flags it. |
| Canonical & sitemap hygiene | Helps AI crawlers find the right version of every page. |
Anatomy of a technical card
Each Technical Suggestion shows:
- The page or pages affected (with URLs)
- The specific issue ("missing FAQPage schema", "robots.txt blocks GPTBot", etc.)
- A solution snippet — usually copy-pasteable HTML or JSON-LD.
- An impact estimate
- A status pill (To do · In progress · Done · Ignored)
Verifying a fix
Once you mark a Technical recommendation "Done", Scout offers a Verify button. Clicking Verify re-fetches the affected URL, re-runs the relevant check, and tells you whether the fix is live. This is the only spoke in the Optimize Hub that can verify changes without waiting for the next scan — useful for engineering reviews.
Technical recs from AI Audit are verified against Claude's checklist. Scan Data recs are verified against the raw HTML of your page. Either way, the verify button gives you a green ✓ or red ✗ within seconds.
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