A site audit gives you a complete picture of your website's technical SEO health — every page, every issue, scored and prioritised so you know exactly what to fix first.
🔍 Run Site Audit All Audit Tools →A site audit is a systematic technical review of every page on your website. It identifies issues that prevent Google from crawling and indexing your content effectively — missing title tags, broken links, slow pages, duplicate content and more. Without a regular audit, these issues accumulate silently and erode your rankings over time.
Results are scored from 0 to 100. Pages scoring below 50 have critical issues that need immediate attention. Each issue is colour coded: red for errors that directly harm rankings, amber for warnings that should be fixed, and blue for recommendations that improve performance.
The most useful thing to understand about any audit is what it structurally cannot tell you. A page must pass three separate gates, and they fail for entirely different reasons:
| Gate | Question | Where the truth lives |
|---|---|---|
| Crawled | Can a bot fetch this page? | Your audit — and your server logs |
| Indexed | Did Google decide to keep it? | Only Search Console |
| Ranking | Does Google think it is the best answer? | Search Console, and the SERP itself |
An audit lives almost entirely in the first row. It will tell you a page is fast, valid, well-titled and perfectly crawlable — and be silent on the fact that Google looked at it, decided it was not worth keeping, and dropped it.
So: run the audit, and read it alongside the Page Indexing report. The audit tells you what is broken. Search Console tells you what Google actually did about it. They answer different questions, and only one of them is Google's opinion.
A crawler starts at the homepage and follows links. It therefore finds only what is linked. That has a consequence people consistently miss: orphan pages are invisible to your audit and entirely present in Google's index.
Pages routinely become orphaned without anyone doing anything:
The only way to find them is to compare sources. Take the crawl, take your XML sitemap, take the list of pages Search Console has seen, and take your server logs. A URL appearing in any of the last three but not in the crawl is an orphan. Server logs in particular are the only place you can see what Googlebot actually fetched, as opposed to what you think exists.
A large audit produces an intimidating number, and the number is a trap. What happens next is predictable: somebody sorts by count, sees 400 missing alt attributes, spends two days adding them, and reports progress. Meanwhile the missing H1 on the single page that earns most of the revenue sits untouched, because it was one row.
Two corrections make the list actionable:
One broken template is one bug, reported four hundred times. 400 pages missing a meta description is not four hundred problems — it is one problem in one template, and one fix. Before triaging anything, group the issues by the template that produced them. The list usually collapses from twelve hundred rows to about fifteen actual defects.
Every audit tool assigns severity in the abstract — a missing title is "critical" wherever it occurs. But impact is severity multiplied by the value of the page. A critical issue on a page nobody visits is not urgent. A warning on the page in your paid ads is.
So before touching the list, pull your top twenty pages by traffic, conversions and inbound links. Fix everything on those, however minor, before fixing anything anywhere else, however severe. It feels wrong and it is right.
This is the section most audit guides omit, and it is the one that explains why so many sites are technically immaculate and commercially invisible.
Technical SEO is a floor, not a lever. It removes the reasons a good page might fail. It cannot make a page good. Once the errors are cleared, the remaining work is content — and continuing to run audits at that point is a way of feeling productive while avoiding the harder job.
An audit is not finished when the fixes ship. It is finished when the fixes are confirmed — and the confirmation step is where most audit programmes quietly stop.
A site audit checks every page it can reach from your homepage. For each page it records the HTTP status code, title tag, meta description, heading structure, page speed, canonical tags, robots directives, structured data, and internal and external links. The result is a prioritised list of issues ranked by their impact on your rankings.
Monthly for small sites. Weekly for sites that publish frequently or have regular content updates. Always run a full audit after any site migration, CMS update, redesign or significant structural change.
Fix pages returning 4xx and 5xx errors first — these waste crawl budget and harm user experience. Then fix missing title tags, which Google replaces with its own often-inferior version. Then address duplicate content and thin pages that may be diluting your site's overall quality score.
Because an audit measures whether a page can be crawled, not whether Google chose to keep it. Those are separate gates and they fail for different reasons. A clean audit alongside a Search Console report full of "Crawled — currently not indexed" is diagnostic: the technical work is done and the problem is the content. Google fetched the pages, judged them insufficient, and declined. No technical fix addresses that.
No. A crawler starts at the homepage and follows links, so it finds only what is linked — and orphan pages are invisible to it while remaining entirely present in Google's index. Products that dropped out of their category listings, campaign pages linked only from an advert that stopped running, and sections removed from the navigation all become orphans. Find them by comparing the crawl against your sitemap, Search Console and your server logs.
First group the issues by the template that produced them: one broken template is one bug reported four hundred times, so twelve hundred rows usually collapse to about fifteen real defects. Then remember that severity is not impact — impact is severity multiplied by the value of the page. Pull your top twenty pages by traffic, conversions and inbound links, fix everything on those however minor, and only then address anything else however severe.
No. A page you deliberately removed should return 404, and a 404 with nothing pointing at it is an accurate report rather than an error. What matters is whether something still points at it: fix the internal link, or redirect an externally-linked URL to a genuine equivalent. Do not redirect it to the homepage to make the number go down — Google treats a redirect to an irrelevant destination as a soft 404, so it passes no value and merely hides the row.
Run the Site Audit and get actionable results in minutes. Pay as you go — no subscription needed.
Run Site Audit →aiwebpageseo.com is a data-driven SEO and AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) platform providing a free suite of technical website tools. Rather than relying on AI-theorised assumptions, the platform analyses live URL performance, delivering objective diagnostics, page speed metrics, CLS debugging, and site crawl data alongside actionable technical tutorials.