What does an SEO audit include?
Updated
A complete audit covers six areas: technical crawlability and indexing, performance, on-page content, security, accessibility, and — since 2025 — how readable the site is to AI crawlers and agents. The deliverable should be a ranked list of findings, each with the measurement behind it and a named fix.
Most answers to this question are a list of 60 checks, which is not useful when you are trying to decide whether a quote covers what you need. The useful version is the structure: what the areas are, why each one is separate, and what a finding in each looks like when it is written properly.
This is the structure our own engine uses and the one our published sample report follows, so you can check the description against a real artefact rather than taking it on trust.
The six areas an audit should cover
These are weighted, because they are not equally important. An inaccessible page that ranks is a problem; a page that cannot be crawled is not a page.
| Area | What it answers | Benchmark average |
|---|---|---|
| Technical SEO | Can search engines crawl, render and index the site correctly? | 80/100 |
| Performance | Does it load fast enough on a mid-range phone? | 78/100 |
| Content | Is there enough unique, intent-matched content per page? | 31/100 |
| Security | HTTPS, headers, exposed surfaces, certificate health | 54/100 |
| Accessibility | Alt text, heading order, contrast, labels | 94/100 |
| AI and E-E-A-T readiness | Can AI crawlers read it? Is authorship and evidence present? | 51/100 |
What a properly written finding contains
This is the part that separates an audit from a crawler export, and it is what to ask for a sample of before you commission one.
- The problem, in one sentence a non-specialist understands.
- The measurement that proves it — counts, timings, URLs, not adjectives.
- The severity, ranked against every other finding rather than within its category.
- The specific fix, naming the file, template or setting where possible.
- What improves if it is fixed, stated honestly, including "nothing measurable on its own".
What is usually left out — and should be
Backlink index metrics such as domain authority scores are vendor inventions, and an audit built on them tells you about the vendor's index rather than your site. We do not include them, and an audit that leads with them is worth reading sceptically.
Keyword research is a separate piece of work. It belongs in a strategy document, not in a technical audit, and bundling them is how audits end up 50 pages long with no clear action.
The AI readiness layer nobody included two years ago
In our benchmark set, 104 of 126 sites exposed no agent interfaces at all — no agents.json, no WebMCP tools, no machine-readable description of what the site can do. That is now a real gap, because a growing share of discovery happens through assistants rather than a results page.
An audit written in 2023 will not check this. Ask whether the scope includes AI crawler access and structured authorship, because retrofitting it later is more work than including it now.
What the deliverable should look like
One scored summary, findings ranked by severity, evidence under each, and the passed checks left visible so the failures stay credible. Anything longer is usually padding, and anything shorter is a score with no argument behind it.
Frequently asked questions
- How many checks should an SEO audit run?
- The count is a vanity number. What matters is whether the six areas are covered and whether each reported finding carries a measurement. A 40-check audit with evidence beats a 300-check export without it.
- Does an SEO audit include keyword research?
- Usually not, and it should not by default. Keyword research is strategy work with a different output; bundling it into a technical audit is what produces 50-page documents nobody implements.
- Does an audit include fixing the problems?
- Rarely. Implementation is normally quoted separately, and you should confirm this in writing — the most common disappointment with audits is receiving a document when the buyer expected changes.
- Should an audit include competitor analysis?
- A light version, yes: how your templates compare against two or three sites ranking above you. A full competitive study is separate work.
- Can I see what a finished audit looks like?
- Yes — we publish a full audit of a site we own, failures included, free to download as PDF, Word, Excel, CSV or Markdown.
Keep reading
See what an audit finds on your site
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