also searched as: ai seo · ai seo tool · seo checker · seo audit · seo audit tools · seo audit for website · seo site audit
Point a crawler at your domain and it returns every broken link, missing tag, redirect chain and blocked page, ranked by severity: robots auditing pages built for other robots, and it works. Free tiers cover most small sites, 500 URLs on desktop or 5,000 pages a month on a site you verify, and AI now drafts fixes like missing alt text.
checked 2026-10-13 · by dan scutaru
the tools that earn the verdict — no pay-to-win
Far enough for a small site, and no further. The desktop crawler in the list audits up to 500 URLs per crawl for free, running on your own computer. The cloud audits meter you by the month instead: one gives you 5,000 crawled pages a month on each site you verify you own, another stops at 100 pages a month on a free account.
Add the free console Google runs for site owners. It is the only report that shows which of your pages Google itself declined to index and how fast they load for real visitors, two things no outside crawler can measure. A site of a few hundred pages never needs to pay for the audit itself.
A website SEO checker is a snapshot: paste a URL, get a score out of 100 and a short list of on-page issues. Most are free, often capped at one check a day or emailed to you as a sales lead. A site audit crawls every page it can reach by following links, the way a search engine does, so it catches what a snapshot cannot: broken internal links, redirect chains, the same title on forty pages, a section that robots rules hide by accident.
Use a checker to sanity-check one page before it goes live. Run a full audit when traffic drops, before a redesign or a domain move, and every few months on any site that changes often.
Less than the label suggests, and most of it after the crawl. Fetching pages and checking tags is ordinary rule-based software that existed long before the AI wave. The AI shows up in three places: writing fixes in bulk (alt text, titles, meta descriptions), explaining an issue in plain English, and letting you question the crawl from a chat assistant, which several audit tools now support through MCP connectors.
The desktop crawler above runs your own prompts against every page it fetches, with your own API key, so unless you point it at a model on your own machine, the provider bills you for every page it reads. Read every generated title before it goes live. A model writes text that sounds right for a page, not text that matches what the page is for.
A technical SEO audit checks whether search engines can reach, read and index your pages: status codes, redirects, canonical tags, robots rules, sitemaps, structured data and speed. A crawler does this well because these are yes-or-no checks. What it cannot judge is which findings matter. Google's own starter guide says content length alone does not matter for ranking and heading order does not matter for search, yet at least one suite above still warns about low word count and notes pages with more than one H1.
It also cannot see Google's side. A page can pass every check and still sit in 'crawled, currently not indexed', and Google says not to expect every URL on a site to be indexed. Start from the indexing report in the free console, then use the crawl to explain it.
Do it yourself if the site is small and you can edit it. Pay someone when you cannot tell which of 300 warnings matter, or cannot make the fixes. In a survey of 439 SEO providers, one-off projects most often cost $2,501 to $5,000 and the average hourly rate was $111; a trade guide puts a basic audit of a site under 20 pages at $500 to $1,000.
What you pay for is judgment, because the crawl is the cheap part. Ask for a sample report before you hire. A good one is a short list in order of impact on traffic, with the fix for each item. A 90-page export of every warning is the tool's output with a logo on it.
An SEO audit is a check of everything that stops search engines from finding, reading and ranking your pages. It covers technical problems like broken links and blocked pages, on-page problems like missing or duplicate titles, and how your content compares with the pages that outrank you. The output is a list of fixes in order of priority, and the technical part is the one software does best.
Crawl the whole site, then fix in order of damage: pages that error or are blocked from indexing, then redirects and broken internal links, then missing or duplicate titles and descriptions, then speed. Compare the crawl with the indexing report in Google's free console, which shows what Google actually did. Then wait: Google says some changes show up within hours and others take several months.
Run any free checker and you get a number out of 100, but there is no official SEO score. Each tool weights its own checks, so the same page scores differently in each. Even Google's free page test says its SEO checks cover only basic advice and that many factors it does not score affect ranking. Track the list of issues over time, not the number.
Yes, as a separate report from the audit. Some of the suites above track a fixed set of prompts and record whether AI assistants mention or cite you, with the number of prompts set by your plan. The audit side is simpler: make sure robots.txt does not block the AI crawlers you want in. Google says its AI features need no special files or markup, only a page that is indexed and eligible for a snippet.
That depends on which of three jobs you mean. For auditing a site, the crawlers above, starting with their free tiers. For drafting articles scored against what already ranks, see writing blog posts that rank. For finding terms worth targeting, see doing my keyword research.