Site Audit: 5-Phase SEO Analysis for Your Entire Site

The Site Audit is a comprehensive, automated analysis that evaluates your entire website across five distinct phases, following the methodology outlined in Google's Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines and web.dev performance standards. Unlike the free single-page audit which checks one URL at a time, the full Site Audit crawls up to 200 pages, cross-references data between pages, pulls Google Search Console performance metrics, and checks your site's readiness for AI-powered search engines. Our audit pipeline has analyzed thousands of sites, identifying an average of 23 fixable issues per site. Each audit produces a detailed report with an overall score, per-category breakdowns, and actionable Fix buttons that resolve issues automatically.

The 5 Audit Phases

Each audit runs through five sequential phases. The first four phases analyze different aspects of your site independently, and the fifth phase generates a weighted aggregate report. Sites with Google Search Console connected receive a deeper analysis with real search performance data.

Phase 1: Technical SEO

The technical phase evaluates your site's foundation — the infrastructure that search engine crawlers interact with before they even look at content. A strong technical foundation ensures Googlebot can discover, crawl, and index every important page on your site without encountering roadblocks.

• Robots.txt validation: Checks for a valid robots.txt file, verifies it does not accidentally block important pages or crawlers, and confirms sitemap references.
• HTTPS enforcement: Verifies all pages load over HTTPS and checks for mixed content warnings that could trigger browser security alerts.
• Canonical tags: Detects missing, self-referencing, or conflicting canonical tags that can confuse search engines about which version of a page to index.
• Redirect chains: Identifies chains of 301/302 redirects that slow crawling and dilute PageRank. Flags redirect loops that prevent pages from loading entirely.
• Page load time: Measures server response time (TTFB) and total page load across sampled pages to identify performance bottlenecks.
• Broken links: Scans internal and external links for 404 errors, 5xx server errors, and timeout failures.

Phase 2: On-Page SEO

The on-page phase analyzes content quality and optimization signals on every crawled page. These are the factors that directly influence how search engines understand and rank your content.

• Title tags: Validates length (50-60 characters optimal), checks for duplicate titles across pages, and flags missing titles.
• Meta descriptions: Evaluates length (120-160 characters), detects duplicates, and identifies pages with missing descriptions.
• Heading hierarchy: Checks for a single H1 per page, logical H2/H3 nesting, and heading tags that match the page's target keyword.
• Content quality: Measures word count (flags pages under 300 words as thin content), evaluates heading-to-text ratio, and checks image-to-text balance.
• Image optimization: Detects missing alt text, checks for lazy loading attributes, and flags oversized images that hurt page speed.

Phase 3: GEO Readiness

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the emerging practice of making your content accessible and attractive to AI-powered search engines — including Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot. The GEO phase checks whether your site is visible to these systems and structured in ways they can easily reference.

• AI bot access: Checks whether GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Bingbot, and other AI crawlers are allowed or blocked by your robots.txt file.
• Schema.org markup: Validates the presence and correctness of structured data (Article, Organization, FAQ, Product schemas) that AI engines use to understand your content.
• Content structure: Evaluates whether your content is organized in clear, referenceable sections with descriptive headings that AI engines can extract and cite.

Phase 4: Search Console

When you connect Google Search Console, the audit pulls real search performance data to complement the crawl-based analysis. This phase is optional but provides significantly deeper insights.

• Top queries: Identifies which search terms are driving clicks and impressions to your site, and which pages they land on.
• Click-through rate (CTR): Flags pages with low CTR relative to their position — indicating title tags or meta descriptions that need improvement.
• Index coverage: Detects pages that Google has excluded from its index and explains why (e.g., noindex tag, canonical to another page, crawl error).
• Average position: Tracks your site's average search ranking across all queries, highlighting opportunities where a small improvement could move you to page one.

Phase 5: Cross-Page Analysis

The cross-page phase looks at your site holistically — identifying issues that only become visible when comparing multiple pages against each other. These are the problems that single-page audits miss entirely.

• Duplicate titles and descriptions: Finds pages sharing identical or near-identical title tags and meta descriptions, which confuse search engines about which page to rank.
• Orphan pages: Identifies pages that have no internal links pointing to them. Orphan pages are difficult for crawlers to discover and rarely rank well.
• Keyword cannibalization: Detects multiple pages targeting the same primary keyword, which causes them to compete against each other in search results.
• Internal link graph depth: Maps how many clicks it takes to reach any page from your homepage. Pages more than 3 clicks deep receive less crawl priority and PageRank.

Scoring Methodology

Each phase produces a score from 0 to 100. These scores are weighted and averaged to produce the overall site score. The weights differ based on whether Google Search Console data is available, since sites with GSC connected receive a more complete picture.

Understanding Your Score

Your overall audit score tells you at a glance how well-optimized your site is. Here is how to interpret the ranges:

• 80-100 (Good): Your site follows most SEO best practices. Focus on the few remaining issues and monitor for regressions.
• 50-79 (Needs Work): There are significant optimization opportunities. Prioritize fixing critical and high-severity issues first.
• 0-49 (Critical): Your site has fundamental SEO problems that are likely hurting search rankings. Address technical issues immediately.

Issues & Fix Buttons

Every issue discovered during the audit includes a severity level (critical, warning, or informational) and a description of what is wrong and why it matters. For many common issues, a Fix button appears that allows you to resolve the problem with a single click.

Running an Audit

Interpreting Phase Results

Each phase score tells a different story about your site's health. A site with a 95 Technical SEO score but a 60 On-Page SEO score has strong infrastructure but weak content — focus on content expansion. Conversely, a site with a 60 Technical score but a 90 On-Page score has great content that's being held back by crawlability issues — fix the technical foundations first. Based on analysis across our customer base, the most common pattern is a strong On-Page score paired with a weak GEO Readiness score, since most sites have not yet optimized for AI search engines.

Audit Frequency Recommendations

How often you should audit depends on how actively you publish and modify your site. Sites publishing 4+ articles per week should run weekly audits to catch regressions quickly. Sites publishing 1–3 articles per week benefit from biweekly audits. Static sites with infrequent changes can audit monthly. After any major site change — theme update, migration, URL restructure — run an audit immediately to catch issues before they affect rankings.

Audit History

Every audit result is saved and accessible from the Sites page. Compare scores over time to track your site's SEO trajectory and measure the impact of your optimization efforts. If you run audits regularly (we recommend monthly for active sites), you can visualize the trend and ensure your score is consistently improving.