Joomla SEO: settings and checklist

Global Configuration

1. System > Global Configuration > Site > SEO Settings: turn on Search Engine Friendly URLs.
2. Turn on Use URL Rewriting to remove index.php from URLs; on Apache, rename htaccess.txt to .htaccess first.
3. Set Site Name in Page Titles (before or after) for consistent branding.
4. Set a site meta description as a fallback, and write specific ones per page.

Pages and articles

• Menu items: set the browser page title and meta description in the Page Display and Metadata tabs.
• Articles: fill in the meta description in the Publishing tab.
• Use readable aliases (slugs).
• Make sure each page has one H1; templates differ in how they output headings.

Technical

• Joomla doesn't create an XML sitemap by itself; use a sitemap extension and submit it.
• Check the default robots.txt doesn't block folders your pages need for CSS and images.
• Turn on caching and Gzip in Global Configuration > System and Server.

Joomla and AI search

• Check robots.txt allows the AI search crawlers you want: OAI-SearchBot (ChatGPT search), Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot. See the AI crawler list and the robots.txt generator.
• Check your host's or CDN's bot protection doesn't block them even when robots.txt allows them.
• Make sure the main text is in the HTML the server sends. AI crawlers don't run JavaScript.
• Avoid nosnippet and tiny max-snippet values on pages you want quoted; they also keep pages out of Google's AI Overviews.