The AEM SEO Quality-Control Checklist for 2026 Releases

Use this section to confirm that search engines can access the important pages and that a prospective customer can move from discovery to the conversion path without a preventable technical failure.

Implement Accurate Structured Data on AEM Templates Evidence required: the live page template, rendered structured data, visible page facts, product or pricing fields that feed the page, and current validation output.

Pass condition: markup is syntactically valid, describes the page accurately, and does not contain ratings, prices, availability, addresses, or other values that conflict with visible information. Fail condition: fields are missing where the chosen vocabulary requires them, values are stale or fabricated, or markup is added mainly in the expectation of forcing an enhanced search appearance.

Severity: high when inaccurate product or commercial data is published; medium when optional descriptive fields are incomplete. Owner: technical SEO or developer, with factual review by the content or product owner.

Corrective action: map each field to a reliable source of truth, remove unsupported properties, and keep rendered page content and structured data synchronized. Validation: retest the live page after deployment and spot-check a sample of page templates.

Structured data is associated with a 10-20% click-through increase (industry estimate); use that range to rank this fix against other template work.

Review Core Web Vitals and Mobile Rendering Evidence required: field data where available, lab diagnostics, screenshots from common mobile widths, image payloads, third-party script inventory, and a complete mobile conversion test.

Pass condition: the page is usable, primary content appears promptly, controls remain stable, and the conversion path works without layout or interaction failures. Fail condition: heavy media, blocking scripts, unstable components, or third-party widgets create observable delay or input problems.

Severity: high on templates that receive conversion traffic. Owner: web performance developer or technical owner. Corrective action: optimize image dimensions and compression, reduce unnecessary scripts, defer nonessential work, and address the template-specific bottleneck rather than chasing a score in isolation.

Validation: compare field and lab measurements after release and repeat the real conversion journey. Use an LCP target under 2.5 seconds as the operating benchmark and evaluate it alongside the wider user experience; meeting it is not a guarantee of rankings.

Confirm HTTPS and Form Security Basics Evidence required: certificate status, redirect behavior, mixed-content checks, checkout behavior, and browser warnings across the main conversion path. Pass condition: important pages load securely, insecure variants redirect correctly, and users do not encounter certificate or mixed-content warnings during checkout or form submission.

Fail condition: insecure resources, expired certificates, inconsistent protocol handling, or warning states appear on pages where users submit personal or payment information. Severity: critical when a warning interrupts the checkout or form path.

Owner: developer, hosting administrator, or third-party platform owner. Corrective action: renew or replace certificates, remove insecure dependencies, enforce consistent secure URLs, and retest third-party integrations. Validation: inspect the live certificate chain and complete a secure conversion-path test on desktop and mobile.

Find Broken Internal Links and Error Pages Evidence required: a fresh crawl, navigation tests, conversion links, hub-to-detail links, detail-to-guide links, and server responses for removed pages. Pass condition: important internal links resolve to relevant live destinations, intentionally removed pages have an appropriate handling decision, and users are not sent into dead ends.

Fail condition: navigation, content cards, guides, breadcrumbs, or calls to action lead to a 404 response without a deliberate user-facing reason. Severity: high for conversion, product, or primary navigation links; medium for secondary editorial references.

Owner: technical SEO or site-content owner. Corrective action: update broken destinations, restore pages that should exist, or use an appropriate redirect only when a true replacement exists. Validation: recrawl the affected paths and manually test the highest-value journeys after deployment.

This section checks whether AEM components make semantic and search-facing output reliable by default.

Audit component semantics in HTML5 output Evidence required: rendered templates, component source, heading controls, landmarks, links, labels, and validation output. Pass condition: headings follow a logical H1-H6 structure, interactive elements use appropriate semantics, and shared components render meaningful markup.

Fail condition: custom components rely on generic wrappers where semantic elements are required, or heading levels are selected only for styling. Severity: high on shared components. Owner: frontend and AEM component engineering.

Corrective action: move semantic requirements into component defaults and authoring constraints. Validation: inspect representative rendered pages with W3C validation and browser accessibility tooling.

Verify Dynamic Media and DAM delivery Evidence required: generated asset URLs, requested dimensions, responsive behavior, formats, transfer size, DAM metadata, and rendered alternative text. Pass condition: media is appropriately sized, meaningful images expose useful text alternatives, and asset delivery does not create avoidable layout or performance problems.

Fail condition: large DAM assets become a #1 avoidable bottleneck, metadata is not mapped into components, or one unsuitable rendition is served across viewports. Severity: high on image-heavy templates.

Owner: DAM or Dynamic Media owner with frontend engineering. Corrective action: standardize responsive image rules and Scene7 delivery where that service is used. Validation: inspect real image requests and rendered markup across representative devices.

Standardize Page Properties metadata Evidence required: dialog fields, inheritance rules, rendered head output, author guidance, and overrides. Pass condition: title, description, robots controls, and supported social metadata have governed ownership and precedence.

Fail condition: duplicate fields conflict, stale values survive rollouts, or robots settings disagree across component layers. Severity: high where shared page models propagate defects broadly. Owner: AEM product owner and component governance team.

Corrective action: define field ownership, precedence, inheritance, and validation. Validation: publish a controlled change and verify the live rendered head.

Implement structured data from governed content sources Evidence required: rendered JSON-LD or other supported markup, visible content, component models, and validation results. Pass condition: markup matches visible content and updates from authoritative fields.

Fail condition: structured data contains stale, hidden, fabricated, or contradictory values. Severity: high when misleading data is emitted at scale. Owner: SEO and component engineering with content-model governance.

Corrective action: map structured data to authoritative sources and remove unsupported properties. Validation: compare rendered markup with visible page facts and current search-platform documentation.

Local search work should begin with business eligibility, accurate identity, and real user needs. Do not create or optimize profiles merely because a location page exists in AEM.

Verify Google Business Profile Eligibility and Ownership Evidence required: the real operating model, customer-facing business information, current Google Business Profile status, categories, contact details, and the website destination used by the profile.

Pass condition: the business is eligible under current platform rules, profile details accurately represent the operation, and users reach an appropriate owned page. Fail condition: a profile is created for an ineligible location, categories misrepresent the business, or duplicate profiles compete for the same operation.

Severity: critical for ineligible or misleading profiles; high for ownership or identity conflicts. Owner: local marketing or operations owner. Corrective action: correct factual details, resolve duplicates, and maintain profiles only for eligible business entities and locations.

Validation: review the live profile from a user's perspective and confirm that website, phone, name, category, and location behavior match the actual operation.

Audit Name, Address, and Phone Consistency Evidence required: owned-site contact pages, eligible business profiles, major directories where the business is legitimately present, and internal CRM or support records.

Pass condition: public business identity is consistent enough that users can recognize and contact the correct operator, while intentional formatting differences do not change the underlying information.

Fail condition: stale phone numbers, old addresses, conflicting business names, or destination pages present contact details for a different operation. Severity: high when users can contact the wrong party; medium for minor formatting inconsistencies.

Owner: operations or local marketing owner. Corrective action: update inaccurate records at their source and prioritize listings that users actually encounter. Validation: manually verify the highest-visibility records after updates rather than relying only on aggregator reports.

Request and Manage Honest Customer Reviews Evidence required: the review-request workflow, eligible customer list, message copy, incentive policy, moderation process, and current reviews on supported platforms.

Pass condition: eligible customers are asked consistently for honest feedback without incentives, suppression of negative experiences, or selection only of satisfied customers. Fail condition: review gating, compensated sentiment, fabricated reviews, or instructions that discourage critical feedback are present.

Severity: critical for deceptive review practices. Owner: customer experience or reputation owner. Corrective action: replace selective or incentivized workflows with a neutral request process and document who is eligible to receive it. Validation: sample recent requests and compare them with the written policy and actual review handling.

Compliance and regulated-industry controls should be reviewed by the appropriate legal, privacy, accessibility, security, and compliance owners rather than treated as ranking tactics.

Audit accessibility against WCAG 2.2 and the organization's adopted standard Evidence required: automated checks, manual keyboard and screen-reader testing, component patterns, DAM metadata behavior, forms, focus handling, and exception records.

Pass condition: shared components satisfy the documented accessibility requirements and meaningful media has appropriate alternatives. Fail condition: component defaults create inaccessible controls, missing labels, unusable focus order, or incorrect mandatory alt text.

Severity: critical where shared components block access to core content or transactions. Owner: accessibility owner and component engineering with legal review where required. Corrective action: fix the shared component or authoring rule rather than relying only on page-level patches. Validation: retest the affected component patterns after release.

Review tracking for sensitive-data exposure Evidence required: analytics and tag configuration, URL parameters, search fields, forms, data-layer values, consent behavior, and server-side collection paths.

Pass condition: the implementation follows the organization's privacy and security controls and avoids exposing sensitive information through search-facing URLs or analytics payloads. Fail condition: regulated or user-entered data can be written into URLs, page titles, logs, tags, or uncontrolled analytics fields.

Severity: critical where sensitive information may be exposed. Owner: privacy, security, analytics, and legal teams with AEM implementation support. Corrective action: minimize collection and remove unsafe parameters or payload fields. Validation: inspect real requests and payloads with test data and obtain required sign-off.

Govern required disclosures in reusable components Evidence required: approved disclosure language, component hierarchy, Experience Fragment use, market variants, legal ownership, and publishing workflow.

Pass condition: required disclosures are present where applicable, versioned, reviewable, and protected from accidental removal. Fail condition: legal text is copied manually, inherited from the wrong market, or lost when components are rearranged.

Severity: high to critical depending on the applicable obligation. Owner: legal or compliance owner with AEM component governance. Corrective action: centralize approved disclosure content and rendering rules where appropriate while retaining market-specific review. Validation: sample live regulated templates and confirm the approved version is rendered in the correct context.

Enable compression in the Apache or Dispatcher delivery path - High - 1 hour Evidence required: response headers, transfer sizes, server or edge configuration, and representative page tests. Pass condition: compressible responses use an appropriate supported encoding without breaking cached or binary assets.

Fail condition: compression is absent where needed, duplicated across layers, or causes response problems. Owner: platform or edge-delivery team. Corrective action: configure compression at the responsible layer and remove conflicts. Validation: inspect live headers and transfer sizes after deployment.

Review robots.txt rules for internal and asset paths - Medium - 30 minutes Evidence required: current robots.txt, public asset URLs, sitemap behavior, rendered pages, and crawl requirements. Pass condition: crawl rules match the public architecture and do not block resources needed to render or understand indexed pages.

Fail condition: broad disallow rules are copied from internal paths without checking public dependencies. Owner: technical SEO and platform team. Corrective action: remove unnecessary blocks and restrict only paths that should not be crawled. Validation: test representative URLs and required resources with crawler diagnostics.

Fix broken internal links with AEM tooling - High - 2-4 hours Evidence required: AEM Link Checker output, external crawl data, navigation tests, redirect inventory, and component ownership. Pass condition: important links resolve to intentional live destinations without avoidable error responses or redirect chains.

Fail condition: shared components or authored links send users and crawlers to broken or unintended destinations. Owner: content operations for authored links and component engineering for shared defects.

Corrective action: fix the source link or component and add redirects only where a genuine replacement exists. Validation: recrawl affected sections and manually test high-value navigation paths.

• Conversion path not present in primary navigation. Evidence: navigation and page templates do not provide an obvious route to the main conversion action. Pass when users can reach the conversion path from relevant commercial pages without dead ends. Severity: high. Owner: website product owner. Corrective action: add a clear, accurately labeled path. Validation: test the complete journey on desktop and mobile.
• Generic keyword over-optimization. Use the common AEM SEO mistakes as a supporting review. Evidence: pages repeat broad terms while failing to match real products, services, or user intent. Pass when targeting reflects genuine product, service, and topic relevance. Severity: medium. Owner: SEO or content lead. Corrective action: remap intent and consolidate thin overlaps. Validation: compare live pages with query and conversion data.
• Low-quality or non-original imagery. Evidence: images are blurry, misleading, over-compressed, or fail to show decision-critical product details. Pass when media accurately represents the offer and works across devices. Severity: high if imagery misrepresents the offer. Owner: marketing with the DAM owner. Corrective action: replace weak assets and optimize delivery. Validation: inspect the live gallery and mobile performance.
• Seasonal information left stale. Evidence: event, offer, availability, or other time-sensitive content remains published after it is no longer accurate. Pass when time-sensitive information is reviewed and corrected as conditions change. Severity: medium, or high where stale information can materially mislead a customer. Owner: content and operations owners. Corrective action: update, date, consolidate, or remove obsolete material. Validation: spot-check seasonal pages against current operational knowledge.