Free SEO audit that also checks whether AI can find you

What a free SEO audit actually is

An SEO audit is a systematic health check of a website against the factors that determine whether it can be found, understood, trusted and ranked — first by search engines like Google, and increasingly by answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews. A good audit answers three questions in order: can machines reach and index this page, can they understand what it's about, and is it a more trustworthy answer than the pages already ranking? Everything else — titles, schema, speed, links — is in service of those three questions.

Most "free SEO audit" tools stop at the surface: they grade your title length, count your images, flag a missing meta description, and hand you a colourful PDF. That's useful, but it's the first ten percent of the job. The reason a page sits on the second page of Google is rarely a short title — it's usually a thin answer, a missing entity, a slow mobile experience, an indexing problem you can't see, or content that no AI model can quote. Our free audit is built to surface those deeper causes, not just the cosmetic ones — and then to do something almost no other free tool does: tell you how ready your site is to be cited by AI.

The scan above fetches your page exactly the way a search crawler would, parses the rendered HTML, measures performance and structured data, and evaluates answer-engine readiness — all without touching or storing your site. In roughly fifteen seconds you get an SEO score, an AEO score, a category-by-category breakdown, and a prioritised list of fixes with plain-language explanations. No account, no card, no email wall.

Why most SEO audits quietly fail you

Here's the uncomfortable truth about audits: a report is not a result. The SEO industry has trained businesses to equate "we ran an audit" with "we improved our SEO", but the two are completely different. An audit that produces a 200-item spreadsheet nobody has the time, skill or budget to action is worse than no audit at all — it creates the illusion of progress while your competitors ship. The bottleneck in SEO has never been knowing what's wrong. It's the weeks of specialist work required to fix it: rewriting content, generating schema, restructuring internal links, compressing images, resolving indexing issues, and doing it again next month.

This is exactly the gap AutoSEO was built to close. The free audit shows you the problems; the platform behind it fixes them. Instead of handing you a to-do list, AutoSEO turns each finding into a task written in plain business language, resolves the fixable ones automatically, and generates the content and structured data your site is missing — then keeps measuring so nothing regresses. You approve a plan; the software does the work. That's the difference between an audit that makes you feel informed and one that actually moves your rankings.

It's also why comparing AutoSEO to a traditional audit tool is a category error. Suites like Semrush and Ahrefs are measurement instruments — brilliant at telling you what's wrong, then charging you $130 or more a month to keep telling you, with AI visibility bolted on as a separate line item. AutoSEO measures and executes, across Google and the AI answer engines, for a single price. The free audit on this page is the front door to that system.

The 22+ checks the free audit runs

The audit is organised into six categories, scored independently so you can see exactly where your site is strong and where it's leaking rankings. Below is what each category looks at and why it matters — this is the same framework AutoSEO uses internally, so the free scan maps directly to the deep audit and the fixes that follow.

The AEO & GEO audit — the part everyone else skips

Search is no longer just ten blue links. A large and growing share of questions are now answered directly inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Google's AI Overviews — often without a single click to a website. If your SEO strategy only optimises for classic Google rankings, you're competing for a shrinking slice of the pie while ignoring the channel that's growing fastest. Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is about becoming the source those assistants cite. Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) extends the same idea to being recommended inside generated answers. Our audit scores both.

The mechanics are different from ranking on Google, and that's why traditional audits miss them entirely. To be cited by an AI model, your content needs quotable, self-contained answer blocks the model can lift without ambiguity; your brand needs to be a clear, well-described entity the model recognises; you need an llms.txt file and open access for AI crawlers; and you need freshness signals, because models weight recently-updated sources heavily. The AEO portion of the audit checks each of these and returns a dedicated AI-readiness score alongside your classic SEO score.

Inside AutoSEO this becomes a living system: the AI Visibility Optimizer actually tests your prompts against five LLMs, shows you whether you're being cited today, and then fixes the exact signals — schema, entity clarity, quotable content, llms.txt — that earn those citations. The free audit is your first read on where you stand.

The technology behind the audit

A free audit is only as good as the data behind it. Ours is built on the same infrastructure that powers the full platform, so what you see in the free scan is a faithful preview of the deep audit — not a watered-down teaser.

• Enterprise SERP & keyword data. The deep audit is powered by DataForSEO — the same clickstream-modelled search data that sits behind the big suites — for real search volume, keyword difficulty, ranked keywords, competitor gaps and live SERP analysis.
• Google Search Console integration. Connect GSC and recommendations are grounded in your actual impressions, positions and click-through rate, page by page and query by query, instead of generic advice.
• A stealth rendering crawler. The scanner fetches and renders pages the way a modern browser does — so JavaScript-built sites, Core Web Vitals and real metadata are captured accurately, not just raw source HTML.
• A dedicated AEO engine. A purpose-built answer-engine audit evaluates the signals that get you cited by AI, and a five-LLM visibility tracker tests ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity against your prompts.
• On-page scoring model. Every page is graded against a 22-plus-point on-page model, so generated content and fixes are held to an objective, repeatable standard before anything goes live.

From audit to auto-fix: what happens next

This is where AutoSEO stops being an audit tool and becomes an SEO team. The moment you continue past the free scan, your site is prefilled and the platform runs the full crawl, then goes to work. Here's the machinery that turns findings into rankings — every one of these is included, no add-ons:

You stay in control the entire time — approve the publishing plan, choose which fixes to apply, and connect a publishing destination when you're ready to let content ship automatically. The result is a repeatable monthly loop: audit, fix, publish, measure, repeat — across Google and the AI answer engines, from one dashboard and one payment method.

How to read your SEO score

Your score is a weighted summary of every check, but the number matters less than what's inside it. Use these bands as a starting point, then let severity guide your order of work:

The single most important rule: fix critical and high-severity issues before you chase score points. A page with an unnoticed noindex can score 85 and still be invisible in Google. Prioritise by impact, not by the size of the number.

The 12-point manual SEO audit checklist

Prefer to audit by hand, or want to understand what the scan is doing under the hood? Work through this checklist. It's the same logic AutoSEO automates — the difference is that the platform does all twelve for every page on your site, every month, and fixes what it finds.

1. 1

   Confirm the page is indexable

   Check meta robots, X-Robots-Tag, robots.txt and the canonical tag. A single stray noindex or wrong canonical can wipe out a page's rankings silently.

2. 2

   Verify one clear H1 and heading order

   Each page needs exactly one H1 that states the topic, with H2s and H3s nested logically. Assistants and screen readers both rely on this outline.

3. 3

   Right-size titles and descriptions

   Titles 30–60 characters, descriptions ~155, both keyword-led and unique. Duplicated titles across pages cannibalise each other.

4. 4

   Match content depth to intent

   Compare your word count and subtopic coverage to the pages already ranking. If they answer ten sub-questions and you answer three, you are thin by definition.

5. 5

   Lead with the answer

   Put a concise, quotable answer near the top. This wins featured snippets, AI Overviews and direct citations in ChatGPT and Perplexity.

6. 6

   Audit internal links

   Every important page should be reachable within three clicks and receive descriptive internal links. Orphaned pages rarely rank.

7. 7

   Fix Core Web Vitals

   Measure LCP, CLS and INP on mobile. Compress images, defer non-critical scripts, and reserve space for media to stop layout shift.

8. 8

   Add and validate schema

   Mark up articles, FAQs, products and your organisation with JSON-LD, then validate it. Schema is how you become a rich result and a known entity.

9. 9

   Cover image ALT and file hygiene

   Descriptive ALT text serves accessibility, image search and AI understanding. Compress and correctly size every image.

10. 10

    Check indexation coverage

    In Search Console, compare submitted versus indexed URLs. Investigate 'Crawled – currently not indexed' and 'Discovered – not indexed' buckets.

11. 11

    Assess AEO readiness

    Publish llms.txt, allow AI crawlers, structure Q&A content, and keep dateModified fresh so answer engines can find and quote you.

12. 12

    Track and re-audit

    SEO is never 'done'. Track rankings and AI citations, then re-audit on a schedule so regressions are caught before they cost you traffic.

SEO audit vs AEO audit vs GEO audit

These three overlap, but they optimise for different destinations. Understanding the distinction is the difference between a strategy built for 2020's search and one built for how people actually find answers now.

The free audit on this page covers SEO and AEO in one pass and flags GEO signals; AutoSEO runs and continuously improves all three, because in practice you need to win on Google and be the source AI recommends. Optimising for only one leaves the other channel to your competitors.

SEO audits by platform

Every platform has its own SEO quirks, and the audit accounts for them. Whatever you're on, AutoSEO can publish fixes and optimised content straight back to it — audit and remediation in the same loop.

Frequently asked questions