How to Do an SEO Audit: A Step-by-Step Checklist

To do an SEO audit, you check whether Google can find and index your important pages, whether each page’s title, headings and content match what people search for, whether the site is fast and works well on phones, whether your business details are right for local search, and whether other sites and AI tools can find, trust and quote you. A business owner can run a solid first audit in an afternoon with Google Search Console, PageSpeed Insights and a free audit tool, and the real work is deciding which handful of problems to fix first. The checklist below is the part to bookmark.

The free tools and checklist you need

Three free tools cover almost everything a small or mid-sized business site needs. Google Search Console shows which pages Google has indexed and why others were left out, and its Performance report lists the searches you appear for with clicks, impressions and average position. PageSpeed Insights tests a page on mobile and desktop, combining lab data from Lighthouse with real-user data from the Chrome User Experience Report.

The fastest way to run the rest of the checks is our free SEO audit, which runs more than 55 checks on your homepage and up to 10 internal pages, tests 20 links for errors, checks that missing pages return a proper 404, and requests your site as GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot to see whether AI crawlers can get in. It gives you six scores (SEO, speed, AEO, GEO, authority and leads) and your top three fixes in about 20 seconds, which leaves your afternoon for the checks a tool cannot judge.

The SEO audit checklist

Step 1: Technical checks for crawling, indexing and speed

Start with the Page indexing report in Search Console, because a page Google has not indexed cannot rank no matter how good it is. Check your main service and location pages first, and read the reason given for any that are excluded. Google notes that “Crawled – currently not indexed” is a common message because it does not index every page on the web, so treat it as a problem only when it affects pages that matter to you.

Next, open yoursite.com/robots.txt. Google says robots.txt is used mainly to manage crawler traffic and is not a way to keep a page out of Google, which needs a noindex tag or a password (Google Search Central). A leftover rule or noindex tag from when a site was being built is a common reason a new site never shows up.

Google uses the mobile version of a site’s content for indexing and ranking (mobile-first indexing), so anything hidden on phones may as well not exist. For speed, Google’s Core Web Vitals targets are a Largest Contentful Paint within 2.5 seconds, an Interaction to Next Paint of 200 milliseconds or less and a Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.1 or less, measured at the 75th percentile of page loads.

Step 2: On-page and content checks

Read each important page’s title and meta description as if you were a searcher, and make each description a short summary unique to its page, as Google’s SEO starter guide recommends. Google asks for titles that are unique, descriptive and concise, and warns against vague ones like “Home”. Our post on how changing a page title affects SEO covers how to rewrite them without losing rankings.

For content, open the Performance report, filter by page, and compare the searches each page appears for with what the page actually says. A page with plenty of impressions but a poor average position is usually close to what people want and needs a clearer answer or more depth, often a faster win than a new page. Google’s guidance on helpful, people-first content is the best yardstick here. Where several URLs show the same content, pick one and point the others to it with a canonical tag or a redirect, as Google explains in its guide to duplicate URLs.

Step 3: Local and link checks

If you serve customers in a particular area, the audit should include your Google Business Profile. Check that it is verified, in the right category, and that the name, address and phone match your website exactly, and if you cannot find your business in Google at all, our guide to why a business is not showing up on Google goes through the usual causes.

For links, look at who links to you in Search Console’s Links report. Google’s spam policies treat buying or selling links for ranking purposes as link spam, which our post on link exchanges in SEO explains in more detail. Do not rush to disavow links, though, because Google says most sites will not need its disavow tool and that it should be used only when there are many spammy links that have caused, or are likely to cause, a manual action.

Step 4: Check AI search visibility

Google says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and that a page must be indexed and eligible to show in Search with a snippet to be used as a supporting link (AI features and your website). The same page says you do not need special AI text files or schema, so the technical checks above already cover most of it. We saw this with Score Smart, the SAT prep platform we run growth for, when one of its test-prep articles ranked #1 on Google and was cited in a Google AI Overview in June 2026.

Other AI tools use their own crawlers. OpenAI says OAI-SearchBot is used to surface websites in ChatGPT’s search features, and Perplexity says PerplexityBot surfaces and links websites in its results, so check that neither your robots.txt nor your firewall blocks them. Finally, look at whether your pages answer questions in the first sentence under a clear heading, because that is the text AI tools find easiest to quote.

Step 5: Turn what you found into a plan

An audit is only useful if it ends in a short, ordered list. Sort every issue by how much it affects the pages that bring in calls, sales or leads, and by how hard it is to fix, then split the list into this week, the next 30 days and the next 90 days. Anything that stops important pages being indexed, or stops forms and phones working, goes at the top. Once the fixes are live, request indexing for the changed pages in URL Inspection and watch the Performance report over the following weeks.

Questions people ask about SEO audits

How often should you do an SEO audit?

Most business websites should run a full SEO audit once or twice a year and a quick check every month in Search Console. Run an extra audit after any redesign, platform move, change of URLs or sudden drop in traffic, because those are the moments when indexing, redirects and tracking most often break.

How long does an SEO audit take?

An automated SEO audit takes seconds to a few minutes, while a manual audit of a small business site takes a few hours to a day, and a large site can take weeks. Our free audit returns its scores in about 20 seconds, leaving your time for the pages that matter most.

Can you do an SEO audit without a tool?

You can do a basic SEO audit without a paid tool by searching site:yourdomain.com in Google, reading each key page’s title and headings, checking robots.txt and testing the site on your phone. Google’s free Search Console and PageSpeed Insights then add what you cannot see by eye, such as indexing status and real-user speed.

What does an SEO audit include?

An SEO audit includes technical checks such as indexing, crawling, speed and mobile use, on-page checks of titles, headings and content, a review of links pointing to the site and, for local businesses, the Google Business Profile. A current audit should also check whether AI crawlers can reach the site and whether pages give answers AI tools can quote.

How much does an SEO audit cost?

An SEO audit costs nothing if you run it yourself with free tools like Search Console and our free audit, while a manual audit from an agency or consultant is priced by the size of the site and the depth of the review. Our guide to what an SEO audit costs breaks down what you get at each level.

What is a good SEO score?

A good SEO score in our free audit is 80 or above, which is a B grade, and 90 to 100 is an A. Scores from 65 to 79 mean the site works but clear issues are holding it back. Scores differ between tools, so read our explainer on what an SEO score means before comparing them.

Does an SEO audit cover AI search like ChatGPT?

A traditional SEO audit does not always cover AI search, so check that yours tests whether AI crawlers like OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot can reach your site and whether your pages answer questions clearly. Our free audit includes an AEO and a GEO score for exactly this, alongside the usual SEO checks.

The quickest way to start is our free SEO audit, which gives you a score and your top three fixes in about 20 seconds, and if you would rather have the fixes done for you, see our SEO services and AI search optimization pages.