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Written by Shannon Willoby
Most websites look healthy at first glance, but a lot can be going on behind the scenes.
Broken links, 404 errors, redirect loops, an AI bot blocked in your robots.txt — these issues don’t announce themselves.
A good SEO audit tool can catch them before they affect your traffic, leads, or revenue.
I’ve used these tools across years of SEO and content work.
To find the ones actually worth your time, I tested the top options and gathered input from SEOs who run audits every day.
The list below includes everything from free, no-login checkers to enterprise suites that crawl millions of pages.
Whether you’re running your first audit or your 100th, you’ll find the right one for you here.
Here’s how they compare.
SEO audit tools vary widely in depth, focus, and price.
Here are the most important capabilities to evaluate before choosing one:
With these qualities in mind, let’s look at why each tool made our list.
If you only need the basics, these free and low-cost SEO audit tools will do the trick.
Best for monitoring your site’s indexing and search performance on Google
Price: Free
Google Search Console is a free tool that shows you data directly from Google.
It’s not a full audit tool, but it’s a handy companion to the other tools on this list.
With GSC, you can:
Chris Hanna, content marketing strategist and senior editor at Backlinko, uses GSC as a starting point for every audit:
The indexing report in GSC is one of the first places I’d look in an audit. It can quickly tell you a lot about a site’s pages, from redirects to noindex tags.
But it’s also useful for spotting content issues. If many pages are crawled but not indexed, it can indicate content quality issues (among other things).
Nothing beats manually checking a few of these pages to gauge whether there are obvious quality issues or if there might be another reason for the non-indexing (e.g., crawl budget).
The “Pages” report (under “Indexing”) shows how many of your pages Google has indexed — and, more importantly, why the rest haven’t been.
For example, the report tells us 21.3K of Backlinko’s pages are indexed. And 495 are not.
Click any reason, like “Crawled – currently not indexed” or “Duplicate without user-selected canonical,” to see exactly which URLs are affected.
The Search Results report (under Performance) tracks clicks, impressions, average CTR, and average position.
Drill into your content’s performance by type (web, image, video, or news).
And add filters such as “Device” or “Country” to learn more about your audience’s preferences and locations.
My favorite filter is “Query,” which lets you break down results by branded and non-branded searches.
Tracking branded queries can provide an indirect signal that AI visibility is translating into brand awareness.
AI search doesn’t always drive clicks, but it plants your brand in people’s heads, so they search for you directly later.
GSC makes that easy to track.
It also provides a high-level overview of your site’s user experience, including Core Web Vitals metrics like load times, interactivity, and visual stability.
Best for budget-friendly, high-level SEO site audits
Price: Free no-login audit; paid plans start at $29/month
When you want a fast rundown of any domain — whether a prospect, competitor, or your own — SEOptimer is a solid, low-cost option.
A subscription includes a dedicated audit tool, along with keyword research, rank tracking, and backlink research tools.
SEOptimer lets you run a free SEO audit once per day, and it surprisingly covers a lot of ground.
I ran my small gardening blog through the tool and had a full report in under 30 seconds.
The report scores sites across multiple categories, including on-page SEO, generative engine optimization (GEO), and usability.
The audit report gives your site a letter grade for each category, along with a prioritized list of recommendations.
The report surfaced a few things worth noting for my site:
For a quick, high-level look across many categories, this tool delivers.
But it doesn’t provide in-depth information. You’ll see what’s wrong, but not much detail on why or how to fix it.
A paid subscription adds keyword rankings, local SEO insights, and the ability to save and schedule audits over time.
If you’re an SEO consultant or small agency owner, a notable standout is SEOptimer’s embeddable audit widget.
It lets your web visitors enter their URL and email address to receive an instant SEO audit report, customized with your brand’s colors and logo.
The audit results then go straight to your inbox as a lead.
These audit tools aren’t built to just find problems — they help you fix them, too.
Best for comprehensive technical + AI search auditing
Price: Free plan available; paid plans start at $139.95/month
Site Audit provides in-depth technical auditing and AI accessibility in one user-friendly dashboard.
Every Semrush One plan includes Site Audit along with a full suite of SEO tools — from competitor analysis to AI visibility tracking — so you can do the majority of your SEO work without switching tabs.
Semrush’s Site Audit checks for 140+ technical and on-page SEO issues, sorts them by severity, and provides plain-language guidance on how to fix each one.
This includes crawlability, Core Web Vitals, internal linking, structured data, HTTPS, and much more.
Then, it alerts you by email about its findings.
For example, I use Site Audit to monitor my gardening blog, and it recently alerted me to a new error: an incorrect page in my sitemap:
A little digging revealed a conflict between Rank Math and a redirection plugin I’d just installed — an easy fix I never would have caught without the tool.
Regular monitoring matters even more at scale.
Chris Shirlow, owner of FourHorse Digital, a digital marketing agency, runs Site Audit across his entire client roster:
Site Audit is my always-on monitoring across all clients. The weekly reports are my safety net, catching stuff before I do if something breaks.
On bigger sites and ecomm builds, that’s broken pages, slow pages, random duplicates — issues you can’t QA manually at scale.
For local SEO work, where I’m publishing dozens of location and service-area pages per client, it’s the broken internal links, redirect chains, and orphan pages that can quietly cost rankings if you’re not watching.
But my favorite feature is the AI accessibility integration.
The AI Search Health Report flags issues like:
The higher your score, the better your site’s technical readiness for AI systems.
Chris Shirlow uses this report as a starting checkpoint with new clients:
Site Audit’s AI Search Health report is a solid diagnostic — I’ve inherited sites where AI crawlers were blocked in robots.txt, which is easy to miss if you’re not looking for it.
The AI Health score is also a clean metric clients can grasp. It’s not a replacement for deeper AI visibility analysis, but it confirms the foundation is in place before the real work starts.
For even larger organizations, there’s the Site Intelligence tool, which is part of the Semrush Enterprise plan.
Designed for enterprises, it monitors technical SEO and AI search accessibility across millions of pages and includes QA and compliance checks.
Semrush One Special Offer: 14-Day Free Trial
With Semrush One, you get access to Semrush Pro AND the AI Visibility Toolkit. It’s your one-stop shop for building brand presence everywhere people search.
Best for tracking SEO audit progress across multiple sites or clients
Price: Starts at $129/month
SE Ranking is an all-in-one SEO platform that bundles site auditing alongside keyword research, rank tracking, and backlink tools.
Whether you run audits across 3 or 30 sites, things can get messy fast.
SE Ranking lets you group audits by category, such as “Local Businesses,” “Ecommerce Clients,” or “Internal Brands,” so they stay organized in one dashboard.
Each audit tracks 115+ issues across crawlability, security, website performance, and on-page factors.
You’ll also get a site SEO score, Core Web Vitals overview, and a list of issues tagged by severity.
Every issue comes with a “How to fix” explanation, so anyone on your team can act on the findings — not just the SEO lead.
Compare any two audits side by side to see exactly how a site’s Health Score, errors, warnings, and notices have changed between scans.
Each comparison shows what’s been fixed and what’s new, which makes it easy to quantify the impact of your SEO work for stakeholders or clients.
Best for real-time monitoring of large, high-stakes sites
Price: Custom pricing
Conductor Monitoring is designed for high-traffic sites where even a small issue can cost real revenue.
It monitors your site continuously and sends alerts the moment something changes.
Conductor Monitoring runs continuously, so issues surface as they occur rather than when the next crawl is due.
It also learns which pages on your site drive the most traffic and revenue and monitors those more frequently.
So if a critical product page or top-performing blog post breaks, you’ll know before the rest of the site is checked.
Conductor also tracks AI crawler activity, helping you see which pages AI systems access, how frequently they’re crawled, and whether there are barriers to AI discoverability.
Alerts are also highly customizable.
Adjust the scope, triggers, sensitivity level, and recipient for each alert, so the right person sees the right problem on the right page, instead of getting pinged about every notice on every page.
Another cool feature for big teams is Conductor’s Content Change Tracking log.
It records what changed, where, and when, with timestamps and before-and-after values that make the cause of a performance shift easier to investigate.
For teams with multiple stakeholders editing the site, that changelog will save a lot of time.
No more tracking down the details or trying to understand when a change was made that affected your site.
These auditing tools focus on specific parts of SEO: technical crawls, local search, and content optimization.
They’re worth adding to your stack when a more general tool doesn’t tell the full story.
Best for customizable technical crawl analysis
Price: Free up to 500 URLs; $279/year per license after that
Screaming Frog is a technical SEO audit tool that assesses your site for 300+ technical and on-page issues.
There’s no SEO health score or user-friendly dashboards, but that’s sort of the point.
This tool is designed for SEOs who already know how to interpret raw data and want more advanced crawl customization.
Screaming Frog is a desktop app (Windows, macOS, Linux) that requires a quick download to use.
It alerts you to a wide range of technical issues, including:
To test it out, I ran a quick audit on my gardening blog.
The report was organized by type (errors, warnings, opportunities) and estimated priority (high, medium, low), which made it easy to prioritize next steps.
It flagged a few different things worth fixing, including two URL pagination errors and 31 URLs with images over 100KB.
While it was good info, the download alone was overkill for a small site like mine.
But large sites are a different story.
On a paid plan, you can audit any number of pages, whether thousands or millions.
But the configuration menu is where Screaming Frog really stands out from other auditing tools.
It lets you:
Chris Shirlow uses Screaming Frog for the technical work that goes beyond what cloud-based monitoring can handle:
I use Semrush’s Site Audit for my baseline monitoring across all clients, but Screaming Frog is what I reach for when I need to really dig into a site at the URL level.
I recently ran a 2,600+ URL content audit, and SF gave me the granular per-URL data I needed to make decisions at scale. I’m currently using it for an internal link audit too, pairing the exports with Python for deep custom analysis.
Best for local SEO auditing and tracking rankings block by block
Price: Starts at $40/month for one location.
BrightLocal is a local SEO audit tool that audits your entire local presence, from your Google Business Profile (GBP) to third-party listings.
It’s popular with local SEO agencies (and local business owners) for its in-depth insights and user-friendly reports.
Whether you’re after more website traffic, foot traffic, or both, BrightLocal can help you get there.
The audit is broken into categories, with in-depth reports for on-site SEO, reviews, listings, GBP, rankings, and more.
The report is color-coded by health status — Good, OK, or Poor — so you can see at a glance where to focus.
It also benchmarks you against competitors.
The Links & Website Authority section compares your link count, linking domains, and website authority so you know where you stack up.
The GBP Audit benchmarks your profile against the top 10 businesses ranking for your target keywords, which is valuable data you’d have to piece together manually otherwise.
You’ll learn how many photos they post, total reviews, star ratings, and rankings, so you can beef up your profile and outrank them.
The report audits your GBP from every angle, so you know exactly what you need to improve, including:
Then there’s the Local Search Grid, which I think is BrightLocal’s most interesting feature.
It tracks up to five keywords across a geographic grid around your business and returns rankings for you at each point.
(And your top 10 competitors.)
That matters because local rankings change block by block — you might rank #2 near your front door and drop off a few streets over.
The grid also tracks these changes over time, so you can see if your visibility is expanding or shrinking week to week.
For agencies managing multiple client locations, it’s a clean way to show clients exactly where their GBP wins and loses across their service area.
Best for auditing and optimizing content for SEO and AI search
Price: Starts at $129/month
Clearscope is a content-first SEO platform.
It won’t replace your preferred tool for website audits, but if you’re looking to improve your content’s performance (and create content briefs at scale), it’s a helpful add-on.
You can use Clearscope to audit an existing URL or start a new draft from scratch.
I tested it on this article by adding the URL and selecting my target keyword.
Within seconds, Clearscope returned a content grade based on a SERP analysis of competing content.
Each suggested term gets an importance score from 1 to 10, so you can see which gaps actually matter.
Click into any term to see how competitors use it in context and whether AI models have used that term in their responses.
The Term Map visualizes the same data as a grid, making it easier to spot patterns across competitors at a glance, and includes position ranking data.
For ongoing audits, Clearscope’s Content Inventory connects to your Google Search Console property and imports your published pages.
From there, it pairs GSC performance data — impressions, clicks, average position — with each page’s Clearscope grade, so you can see content quality and traffic side by side.
It also calculates an SEO Value for each page (GSC clicks multiplied by average CPC), which gives you a quick estimate of what that organic traffic is worth.
That’s useful when you’re deciding which pages to refresh first.
Content Inventory comes with pre-built views that sort your pages into different categories like “Striking Distance Queries,” “Technical Issues,” and “Internal Linking.”
The AI Cited Pages report shows which of your pages are cited by ChatGPT and Gemini and flags high-ranking pages that aren’t being cited at all.
You can also track topics across ChatGPT and Gemini to see when and how your brand gets mentioned.
Learn your share of voice across AI platforms and which prompts surface for each topic, so you can use the data to prioritize content changes intended to improve visibility.
A technically healthy site has always been important for rankings.
But now you’re competing for LLM visibility, too — and that means technical accessibility belongs in the audit too. AI systems can’t retrieve pages they can’t reach or parse.
These SEO audit tools help you get there.
Get started with a free Website Audit report that covers everything from on-page SEO to indexing problems.
Then, check out our technical SEO guide for a deeper look at the factors that affect how search engines and AI systems access your site.
Backlinko is owned by Semrush. We’re still obsessed with bringing you world-class SEO insights, backed by hands-on experience. Unless otherwise noted, this content was written by either an employee or paid contractor of Semrush Inc.
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