On this page8 sections
What does the free check test?
Nine things, all of them verifiable by hand: title, description, main heading, sitemap, indexability, canonical URL, live AI search access, business markup, and content without JavaScript.
These checks cover the technical starting point for search engine optimization. A full SEO audit also needs context: the services you want to grow, the searches you already appear for and the pages bringing people to your website. See what a full SEO audit should cover.
- Title and description
- Whether they exist, and whether they're the length that survives being shown in a result.
- One H1
- Exactly one main heading. Zero is common on template sites; four is common on page builders.
- Sitemap
- Whether a usable XML sitemap exists and returns pages rather than an error.
- AI crawler access
- Whether robots.txt blocks OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot or PerplexityBot. Training crawlers are not tested.
- Indexability and canonical
- Whether the page accidentally says noindex, and whether its canonical points back to the URL being checked.
- LocalBusiness markup
- Whether your address, hours and phone are present as structured data.
- Content without JavaScript
- How much of the page is in the HTML before scripts run, which is all some crawlers ever see.
What can't it check?
Two things that matter and both need a person: whether your Business Profile is in the right category, and whether AI assistants actually name you.
The category check needs a human comparing what you do against what people in your sector search for. The AI-naming check needs the questions your customers would genuinely ask, run against a live assistant, with the answers read by a person rather than reduced to a pass or a fail.
That's what the audit is for. Every engagement starts the same way: a free check, then a full audit before any work starts, in your hands before you commit to anything.
Is it really free?
Yes, and it doesn't ask for your email. No form, no signup, no PDF that arrives on Thursday with a salesperson attached.
Running the website check is free. The page gives you a next step, while detailed findings stay private for the meeting. We discuss any proposed SEO services and their price before work begins.
What does the result mean?
The check helps start a conversation about your website. It does not measure rankings, organic traffic or enquiries.
A technically accessible page can still miss the questions customers ask. In the meeting, we can discuss page optimization and content creation alongside the technical findings. Search Console access is needed to assess your own search traffic; a public scan cannot supply that data.
Passing these checks does not guarantee specific rankings. The next step depends on the evidence and your business goals, including whether ongoing SEO work would be useful.
Check my site
The same checks this page describes, run against your own site. About 30 seconds.
Check my site→Which kinds of problems matter most?
Crawl access, then title and description, then headings. Anything blocking a crawler outranks everything else, because nothing downstream matters until the page can be read.
This is the general order of leverage rather than a readout of your own result. A robots.txt block or an accidental noindex costs you every result on the page and takes one line to fix. A missing title costs you the click on every result you do earn. Multiple H1s are a smaller problem and can wait a week.
Structured data comes after those. An optional llms.txt can be maintained cheaply, but it is not a prerequisite and is not one of the nine tests.
Does running it affect my site or my ranking?
No. It makes a small number of ordinary read-only requests to public pages, the same way any search engine does.
Nothing is written, submitted or installed. It reads your page, robots.txt and sitemap; a sitemap index can require a few bounded child requests to count pages.
Results aren't stored against your business or added to a list. There's no email to collect, so there's nothing to send you afterwards.
My check came back green. Do I still need help?
Probably not from us. Green means the automated basics are in order, and the remaining questions are your Business Profile and whether you rank for terms that matter.
The check tests what a machine can test. It can't tell you that your primary category is wrong, that your five service pages are competing with each other for one phrase, or that the search sending you customers isn't the one you built the site around.
If the check is clean and you're still not getting calls, that's a content and positioning problem rather than a technical one, and it's worth a conversation before it's worth a retainer.
How is this different from the free audits agencies send?
You can start the automated check without leaving an email. The meeting is where we explain the findings in the context of your business.
The tests listed on this page describe what the tool examines. They are a starting point for reviewing a website, not a complete SEO strategy. We keep the detailed results private and use the meeting to explain which changes are supported by the findings.
