Free SEO audit: the report on your whole site, by email

How the audit works

You enter the site’s address and your email. A confirmation message is sent to that address straight away: it contains a link valid for 24 hours, which proves the mailbox is yours. Until the link is opened, nothing is read on your site, and a request that is never confirmed disappears after a day.

The link opens the report page, and the audit starts right away. A bar shows each read in progress: the sitemap, the home page, the ten chosen pages, then the domain checks. The server reads one address at a time and the browser runs the analysis as it goes. At the end, the report appears on screen and is sent by email, with a summary of the points to deal with and the permanent link to the full page.

The report stays available at this private address as long as its data is kept. Every email carries a link to delete everything whenever you wish.

What the audit checks

The pages first. The audit reads the home page, then ten pages taken from the sitemap the site declares, spread across its whole list so as not to stop at the first entries. Without a readable sitemap, it takes the internal links of the home page. Each page goes through the ten checks of the on-page SEO audit: title and meta description, HTTP codes and redirects, headers, indexability, AI crawlers, hreflang, headings, alt text, links and structured data.

Then the site, with four checks. The sitemap: present or not, declared in robots.txt or not, and above all consistent with the pages read, since a sitemap address that redirects or returns an error has no place there. The CMS and hosting lookup lists the technologies visible on the home page, the IP address block and the SPF and DMARC records of the domain’s email. The domain name dates tell when it expires. The subdomain finder lists the names visible in public certificates and spots those that look like test environments.

How to read the report

The report opens with a summary ranked by severity. Blocking: the point stops Google from indexing a page or breaks markup. To fix: it harms the site without excluding it. To note: advice or information. Each line of the summary gives the number of pages affected and lists them. A finding that comes back on ten pages out of eleven weighs more than an isolated remark, and a single change to the page template or the server often fixes it in one go.

Next come the site checks, then the details page by page, each section with its verdict and a link to the tool that lets you dig further. Each page has its score out of 100, and so does the site, calculated as explained below.

How the score is calculated

The report gives a score out of 100 to each page and to the site. It is the tool’s own scale: Google publishes no weighting between these checks. It follows the order of priority of its documentation, technical requirements first, then what hinders crawling, then presentation best practices.

Each page starts at 100, and each finding removes a number of points specific to its type: 14 for a missing title, 4 for a title that is too long, 25 for a page that sends almost no text in its HTML, 12 for a canonical pointing to another address. When the finding covers a number of elements, the deduction ranges from 40% of the weight for an isolated case to the full weight when every element is affected. Each section has a cap, and a page excluded from the index is capped at 15. The page scale is detailed on the on-page SEO audit, which uses the same one.

The site score is not a plain average: each page counts according to its importance. The home page counts three times. Another page counts once, once more if the home page links to it, and a quarter more for each other page read that links to it, up to once. A badly set key page therefore weighs more than an isolated one. The site findings then remove their own points, 25 at most: a sitemap address that does not lead to an indexable page, a domain that expires in less than 30 days, several SPF or DMARC records. An expired domain caps the site at 15.

Below each score, the report shows where the points went. Reading guide: 90 and above, very good; 75 to 89, good; 50 to 74, needs work; below 50, poor.

What Google asks for, and what the audit takes from it

Google sets three minimum conditions for a page to be indexable: Googlebot is not blocked, the page returns an HTTP 200 code and it has indexable content. It also states that meeting them does not guarantee indexing.¹ The audit therefore puts first anything that breaks one of these conditions on one of the pages read: a noindex, a 4xx or 5xx error, a robots.txt that forbids access.

On page discovery, the SEO starter guide says Google finds most pages through links from pages it has already crawled, and that a sitemap remains optional.² The sitemap documentation gives the cases where it helps: a large site, a new site with few external links, a site with lots of video or images. A site of about 500 pages or fewer, comprehensively linked, can do without.³ The audit therefore ranks a missing sitemap as a simple remark.

When a sitemap exists, Google asks you to include the addresses you want to see in its results, and notes that it generally shows canonical addresses. It accepts two ways of making it known: Search Console or a “Sitemap:” line in robots.txt.⁴ Hence the audit’s two consistency checks: a sitemap address that redirects, returns an error or is blocked is flagged to fix, and a sitemap not declared in robots.txt gets a remark.

Why only once per site

Each audit reads about fifteen addresses on your site and in public registries. To keep the service free, it is offered once per domain name and once per email address, over twelve months. If you request it again with the same address, the link to the first report is emailed to you again. With another address for the same site, the page only says that an audit has already been sent.

To follow a single point after a fix, the detailed tools stay free with no limit on the number of runs: the on-page audit rereads one page at a time, as often as needed.

What happens to your data

The email address serves two purposes: checking that the request comes from you and sending you the report. It is only used to contact you again if you tick the second box, which is unticked by default. Without it, the address and the report are erased thirty days after sending. With it, they are kept for three years, the period the CNIL, the French data protection authority, allows for a prospect’s data, counted from collection or from the prospect’s last contact.⁵

To apply the one-audit-per-site rule, the audited domain, the date and a fingerprint of the email address are kept for twelve months, then disappear. A deletion request also erases that fingerprint. The CNIL asks that every message identify its sender and offer a simple way to refuse further messages:⁶ every audit email is signed and carries a deletion link.

The limits of the free audit

Eleven pages do not tell everything about a site of several hundred addresses. The sample catches the defects repeated by a page template or by the server, which are the most common, but it can miss an orphan page or a whole badly configured section. The HTML is read as the server sends it, without running JavaScript, and loading speed is not part of it.

An automatic audit reads signals. It does not say which queries bring you visits, whether the content answers what your customers are looking for, or where your backlinks stand against competitors. That work is done in the full SEO audit, which crawls the whole site, cross-checks Search Console data and ranks actions by expected gain.

Frequently asked questions