An SEO audit checks whether Google can find, read and show the pages of your website, and lists what gets in the way. You can do the first pass yourself with free tools: Google Search Console, PageSpeed Insights and the “view page source” command in your browser. Below are the 19 checks we open every audit with, how to run each one for free and what counts as a problem. If you would rather hand the job over, our technical audit covers every page of the site and ends with a ranked list of fixes for your developer.
Self-check in 19 points
Most checks use Google Search Console, so add and verify your site there first. It is free and shows how Google itself sees your pages.
| # | What to check | How to check it for free | It is a problem if |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Pages in the index | Search Console, Indexing, Pages | service pages sit under “Crawled, currently not indexed” or “Discovered, currently not indexed” |
| 2 | One address for the site | type the http, https, www and non-www versions of your domain in the browser | more than one version opens on its own instead of redirecting to the main one |
| 3 | robots.txt | open yoursite.com/robots.txt; Search Console, Settings, robots.txt report | you see Disallow: /, or rules that block pages, CSS or scripts you need |
| 4 | noindex tags | view source of key pages and search for “noindex”; URL Inspection in Search Console | a page you want found carries noindex, often left over from a test site |
| 5 | Canonical tags | view source and search for “canonical”; URL Inspection shows the canonical Google chose | the tag points to another page or to the home page, or Google picked a different canonical than yours |
| 6 | XML sitemap | open /sitemap.xml; Search Console, Indexing, Sitemaps | no sitemap, it was never submitted, or it lists redirects, 404 pages or noindex pages |
| 7 | Redirects | browser developer tools, Network tab, then open an old address | one address passes through two or more redirects, or a moved page uses a temporary 302 instead of a 301 |
| 8 | Broken pages | Search Console Pages report, “Not found (404)”; click through your menu and footer | menu or text links lead to 404 pages, or a deleted service page has no redirect |
| 9 | Speed on phones | PageSpeed Insights, Mobile tab, real-user data at the top | LCP above 2.5 s, INP above 200 ms or CLS above 0.1, the “good” limits Google lists on web.dev |
| 10 | Layout on phones | open the site on your own phone | text needs zooming, buttons overlap, the page scrolls sideways, a pop-up covers the content |
| 11 | HTTPS | the address bar in your browser, on several pages | a security warning, or http addresses still showing in Google |
| 12 | Page titles | view source, the <title> line; search site:yourdomain.com in Google |
titles repeat across pages, are missing, or do not name the service |
| 13 | Headings | view source and search for <h1 |
no H1, the same H1 on many pages, or the H1 is the logo |
| 14 | Duplicate pages | Search Console Pages report, “Duplicate without user-selected canonical”; site: search |
the same text sits at several addresses (filters, tags, tracking parameters), or city pages differ by one word |
| 15 | Structured data | Rich Results Test for key pages | errors in the markup, or markup that states facts not shown on the page |
| 16 | Internal links | Search Console, Links, Internal links | main service pages get few links from your other pages, or a page has no links pointing to it at all |
| 17 | Text that needs scripts | URL Inspection, Test live URL, View tested page | the main text or the menu links are missing from the HTML Google received |
| 18 | Access for AI assistants | robots.txt, plus the bot settings of your hosting or CDN | rules or a firewall block OAI-SearchBot or other search crawlers of AI assistants |
| 19 | Company facts | read your contacts page, footer and About page side by side | the phone, address, prices or year of founding differ between pages |
On point 18: OpenAI’s crawler documentation says sites that opt out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers. A security plugin or a “block all AI” rule can catch it too, so look for its name in your rules.
How to read what you found
A problem on one page is a task. The same problem on every page built from one template is a pattern, and one fix in the template solves it everywhere. Work in this order: first anything that keeps pages out of the index (points 1 to 6), then duplicates and redirects, then speed, markup and links. Speed and markup matter less while Google still cannot index the page.
Free tools have limits. Search Console shows example pages for each issue rather than a crawl of the whole site, PageSpeed Insights tests one address at a time, and neither tells you which pages are missing for the searches your buyers make.
What our technical audit adds
| Part | What we do | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Full crawl | we crawl every address on the site and compare it with your sitemap and with the Search Console index | a list of pages Google cannot reach, does not keep, or keeps twice |
| Priorities | each issue gets the number of pages it affects and its effect on search | one ranked list, with the index blockers at the top |
| Developer instructions | what to change, where, and how to check the change worked | tasks your developer can take one by one; we check the result ждёт данныхTO CONFIRM with owner: re-check included in the price |
| Demand and the top 10 | queries your buyers use, the page each one should land on, what the current top 10 pages have that yours lack | a page map: query, monthly demand, page address |
| AI assistants | crawler access, the text bots actually receive, company facts, and a few buyer questions in ChatGPT and Perplexity | how assistants see your site today and what blocks them |
If the AI part is your main question, the AI visibility audit goes much deeper: 30 buyer questions, three AI engines, three runs each. For a quick first look, try the free AI visibility check.
The audit is the first step of our SEO service, and you can also order it on its own.
Our own data · aoe.kz
Tested on our own site first
- Period
- Sep 22 to Oct 6, 2026, weekly
- Market
- Almaty, Kazakhstan; Russian-language queries; desktop
- Sample
- 17 queries, 20 from Oct 6 (3 added)
- Source
- Google results with AI Overviews, collected via DataForSEO
- Measured
Price and timing
The SEO audit is priced per project after a short brief, because a 30-page service site and a store with 20,000 products are different jobs. The brief covers the number of pages, the platform, the countries and languages, and access to Search Console. Payment is 50% when we start and 50% when we deliver the report. ждёт данныхTO CONFIRM with owner: audit timing.
Questions
Is a free online SEO checker enough?
For a small site it is a useful start. Checkers score pages against a fixed list of rules. They do not see your Search Console data or know which searches matter to your business.
Do you fix the problems yourselves?
In most cases your developer applies the changes and we check the result. If you have no developer, we agree on access and on who approves each change, in writing, before anyone touches the site. ждёт данныхTO CONFIRM with owner: whether we edit client sites.
What you get every month
A report you can forward to your team
Same questions, same assistants, three runs. What changed, what we did and what comes next, with every change linked to the live page.
visibility report
Sample filled with real data from our own site, aoe.kz (Almaty, Kazakhstan). Your reports show your client only.
1. Summary
- Google AI Overviews started citing two of the updated pages.
- New citations appeared 1 to 7 days after the pages were updated.
2. AI answers, 3 runs per question
| Assistant | Question | Named |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | recommend a marketing agency (city) | 3 of 3 |
| Perplexity | recommend a marketing agency (city) | 3 of 3 |
| Perplexity | where to order a website (city) | 0 of 3 |