How to Run a Quality Website SEO Audit in 2026
Running a quality website audit is essential to maintaining strong search visibility — for Google, and increasingly for AI search tools too. Even a site that looks perfect on the surface can be quietly losing rankings to broken links, missing schema, or blocked AI crawlers that never show up in a casual glance.
Here's the checklist we run on every new client's site, broken into four stages.
1. Indexation and crawl health
- Indexation status — how many of your pages Google has actually indexed, checked via Search Console
- Robots.txt — confirm it isn't accidentally blocking important pages, or AI crawlers like GPTBot, ClaudeBot and Google-Extended
- XML sitemap — present, submitted, and free of errors
- 404 errors — broken pages still being linked to internally or externally
2. Technical performance
- Core Web Vitals — loading speed, interactivity and visual stability, checked via PageSpeed Insights
- Mobile usability — the majority of local searches now happen on mobile
- HTTPS and security — a baseline trust signal for both users and search engines
- Structured data — LocalBusiness, Service, FAQPage and Article schema implemented correctly
3. On-page content
- Title tags and meta descriptions — unique, under length limits, and matching real search intent
- Heading structure — one H1 per page, with a logical H2/H3 outline underneath
- Thin or duplicate content — pages under roughly 300 words, or near-duplicates competing with each other
- Internal linking — important pages reachable within a few clicks of the homepage
4. Off-page and authority signals
- Backlink profile — quality and relevance of sites linking to you, and any spammy links worth disavowing
- Google Business Profile — complete, accurate, and actively maintained if you're a local business
- Citation consistency — your business name, address and phone number matching across directories
- AI citation check — whether ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google AI Overviews already mention your business, and how accurately
Turning the audit into action
An audit is only useful if it produces a prioritised list, not just a report full of red flags. Rank every issue by two things: how much traffic or revenue it's likely costing you, and how quickly it can realistically be fixed. Start with high-impact, low-effort fixes first — a blocked robots.txt rule or a missing sitemap can often be fixed in an afternoon and unlock immediate gains.