Skip to content

Audit rules

Every check, and what it cannot tell you

44 rules: 31 on every page, 13 across a site crawl, plus live fetches as 17 AI crawlers. We publish fewer rules than some tools on purpose: each one records the value it read, and a test that returned nothing is marked not measured instead of counted.

Run all of them on your page:

SEO 20

Whether search engines can discover, crawl, and understand this page.

  • HTTPS connection

    Whether the URL that answered is served over HTTPS, after following redirects.

    https · scored

  • Page title

    Whether the head contains a title element and how long it is.

    title · scored

  • Meta description

    Whether a meta description is present and its length.

    description · scored

  • Indexing directives

    The robots meta tag and X-Robots-Tag as sent, read as data rather than as prose.

    index · scored

  • Canonical URL

    Whether the page declares a canonical and what it points at.

    canonical · scored

  • Main heading

    Whether the source HTML contains exactly one h1 and its text.

    h1 · scored

  • Mobile viewport

    Whether a viewport meta tag is present.

    viewport · scored

  • Image alternative text

    How many images in the source HTML carry an alt attribute, including empty ones.

    alt · scored

  • Descriptive link labels

    The anchor text of internal links, looking for generic labels like "click here" or "read more".

    link-text · scored

  • Structured data formats

    Which structured data formats appear: JSON-LD, microdata, RDFa, and their @type values.

    schema-presence · scored

  • JSON-LD syntax

    Whether each JSON-LD block parses as JSON.

    schema-json · scored

  • JSON-LD context

    Whether each JSON-LD block declares an @context of schema.org.

    schema-context · scored

  • Common schema properties

    Which commonly expected properties are present on each entity type.

    schema-fields · scored

  • robots.txt discovery

    Whether /robots.txt answers and whether its content parses as a robots file.

    robots · scored

  • Sitemap discovery

    Whether /sitemap.xml answers and how many URLs it contains.

    sitemap · scored

  • Reserved image dimensions

    How many images in the source declare width and height attributes.

    image-size · scored

  • HTML response weight

    The byte size of the HTML response as received, compressed or not as sent.

    html-size · scored

  • Server response time

    Time to first byte for the audited request, from our machine.

    response-time · scored

  • Synchronous head scripts

    Script tags in the head with neither async nor defer.

    blocking-scripts · scored

  • Image loading strategy

    Which images declare loading="lazy" and which declare fetchpriority.

    image-loading · scored

Answer clarity 4

Whether the page answers the question a reader arrived with, and whether that answer is reachable.

  • Text available in source

    How much readable text is present in the HTML the server returns.

    geo-readable · reported, never scored

  • Content structure

    The heading outline of the document as sent.

    geo-outline · reported, never scored

  • Snippet controls

    Whether directives limit how much of the page a search engine may show.

    aeo-snippet-controls · reported, never scored

  • Opening answer passage

    Whether the page opens with a self-contained passage that answers the obvious question.

    aeo-answer-lead · reported, never scored

AI search 5

The evidence a generative answer could draw on, plus any visibility that has actually been measured.

Additional improvements 2

Worth doing for readers and assistive technology. Not search ranking signals, and never scored as such.

  • Heading structure

    Whether heading levels are sequential and no level is skipped.

    a11y-heading-structure · reported, never scored

  • Document language

    Whether the html element declares a language and whether it is a valid language tag.

    a11y-document-language · reported, never scored

Site crawl 13

Checks that need more than one page. They run on a site crawl, on paid plans.

  • Two or more pages share the same title.

    duplicate-title

  • Two or more pages share the same meta description.

    duplicate-meta-description

  • Pages whose main text is identical.

    duplicate-content

  • Pages whose text is almost the same (similarity hash).

    near-duplicate

  • An internal link that takes more than one redirect to land.

    redirect-chain

  • Redirects that never reach a page.

    redirect-loop

  • An internal link to a page that answers with an error.

    broken-internal-link

  • A page in the sitemap that no crawled page links to. Not measured when the crawl hit its cap.

    orphan-page

  • A page more clicks from the home page than a reader would go.

    deep-page

  • A page that links nowhere else on the site.

    no-outgoing-links

  • A page with so many links that each one carries little weight.

    over-linking

  • Name, address and phone that disagree between pages.

    local-business-contact

  • Pages that mention a topic another page covers, without linking to it. Suggestions, never defects.

    internal-link-suggestions

AI crawlers we fetch as 17

Not a robots.txt reading: we request the page as each crawler and report whether it got through, so a CDN or firewall block shows up too.

Machine-readable: methodology and every definition as JSON · what we do not measure