Free SEO Audit: the 10 Tools and the Method to Do It Yourself

A free SEO audit is an analysis of your website with tools that require no subscription, to find what is holding back its search rankings: non-indexed pages, missing tags, broken links, slowness. Two families of tools coexist: online analyzers, which score a page in seconds, and official tools and crawlers, which examine the whole site. The latter do the real work.

What money buys after that is analysis time and experience, not data you cannot get. For a free SEO analysis of your website, here are the ten tools that actually help, with their limits checked on October 7, 2026, then the six-step process I have my clients go through before any quote.

The 10 free SEO audit tools, compared

If you only pick three: Search Console, the free version of Screaming Frog (or Ahrefs Webmaster Tools if your site has more than 500 URLs) and PageSpeed Insights. The rest is for checking one specific point or getting a second opinion.

Each free tool in detail: what it covers, its limits

1. Google Search Console: the mandatory starting point

It is the only tool that tells you what Google really sees of your site, and it is free. What I look at in an audit: the Page indexing report (above all the exclusion reasons), the Performance report with the queries and pages that get impressions, the URL Inspection tool to test a specific page, the Core Web Vitals report, the robots.txt report and the status of sitemaps.

Limits: you only see your own sites, after verifying ownership, and performance data goes back 16 months at most. It does not crawl the site for you: a page Google has never found does not appear in it, which is why you need a crawler.

2. PageSpeed Insights: speed measured on your real visitors

PageSpeed Insights shows two things you should not confuse. Field data, from the Chrome UX Report, aggregates the experience of real visitors over the last 28 days. Lab data simulates a page load on a fixed device and connection. For SEO, field data is what counts: aim for an LCP under 2.5 seconds, an INP under 200 milliseconds and a CLS under 0.1, the thresholds published by Google.

Limits: one public URL at a time, and no field data for pages with too few visits. Test your three most important pages, not just the homepage.

3. Screaming Frog SEO Spider, free version: the go-to crawler

This desktop software crawls your site like a bot and reports response codes, title and meta tags, H1s, robots directives, canonicals, redirects, page depth and broken links. It is the core tool of a technical diagnosis, and the one I use in client work.

Limits: the free version is capped at 500 URLs per crawl. It does not let you save a crawl, render JavaScript, run custom extraction or connect to Search Console, Google Analytics or PageSpeed Insights. The paid license costs €245 per year according to the publisher's website. For a brochure site or a small business blog, 500 URLs is often enough. If you use Claude, I have also explained how to connect Claude to your Screaming Frog crawls.

4. Ahrefs Webmaster Tools: crawl and backlinks for your own sites

The free version of Ahrefs, reserved for sites whose ownership you verify, gives access to three tools: Site Audit (the crawler), Site Explorer (backlinks and the keywords the site ranks for) and Web Analytics. It is the best free option when the site goes beyond Screaming Frog's 500 URLs, and the only one on this list that shows a reasonably complete backlink profile.

Limits: 5,000 crawl credits per month per project for Site Audit, and 1,000 backlinks or keywords visible at a time in Site Explorer. The number of verified sites is unlimited. You cannot analyze a competitor.

5. Bing Webmaster Tools: the second opinion, and citations in Copilot

Microsoft's equivalent of Search Console, completely free. It gives a different view of the same site: the Site Scan tool runs a technical audit (broken links, duplicate tags, missing metadata), plus URL inspection, backlinks, keyword research and URL submission through IndexNow.

Since February 2026, it has also shown an AI Performance report (in public preview): how many times your pages are cited as sources in Copilot answers and Bing's AI summaries, which URLs, and the queries that triggered those citations. It is one of the few free sources of data on visibility in answer engines. To go further, here is my method for measuring brand visibility in AI tools.

Limits: the data covers Bing and the Microsoft ecosystem, not Google. Bing traffic is lower, but the technical problems it flags are often the same.

6. Rich Results Test and Schema.org validator

Google's Rich Results Test checks that a page carries valid structured data that is eligible for rich results. The Schema.org validator (validator.schema.org) checks all the markup, including types Google does not display. Both accept a URL or a code snippet.

Limits: one page at a time. To check a whole site, look at the enhancement reports in Search Console instead.

7. Lighthouse: the audit built into Chrome

Lighthouse is built into Chrome's developer tools (right-click, Inspect, Lighthouse tab). It scores a page on performance, accessibility, best practices and SEO basics. Its advantage over PageSpeed Insights: it also works on a non-public page, for example a staging site before it goes live.

Limits: lab data only, which varies with your machine and your connection. Its SEO score checks fundamentals (title, meta description, crawlable links), not rankings.

8. Semrush, free account

A free Semrush account, no credit card required, gives access to the Site Audit tool, position tracking and a few domain, keyword and backlink analyses. Useful to get a list of technical errors sorted by severity, and a first look at the competition.

Limits: 100 pages audited per month, 10 requests per day on the research tools, 10 keywords in position tracking. On a site with more than 100 pages, the audit only sees part of the site.

9. Seobility, Basic plan

Seobility's free plan crawls a site and ranks technical and content issues, with light position tracking. The interface is simple, which makes it accessible to non-specialists.

Limits: a single project, 100 pages per crawl and 10 tracked keywords.

10. Alyze: single-page analysis, a French tool

Alyze analyzes a page for free, with no account needed: technical factors, tags, links, images, and above all a semantic analysis of the page against the target keyword. It is the most content-focused tool on this list, useful to check that a page covers its topic well. It is built in France and geared to French-language content, so it is most useful if you also publish in French.

Limits: the analysis is page by page; advanced features are part of the Premium plans.

Free online SEO audit: what is a score out of 100 worth?

A search for "free SEO audit" brings up plenty of online analyzers: SEOptimer, the Rank Math analyzer, Get Ranking, SEO Tester Online and others. You enter a URL and, within seconds, get a free SEO report with a score and a list of things to fix.

They are useful for a first pass, as long as you know what they measure. They count what can be counted: missing tags, images without an alt attribute, no HTTPS, page weight. They cannot tell whether your pages are indexed, whether two of them compete for the same query, or whether your most profitable page is poorly linked to the rest of the site.

How to do a free SEO audit in 6 steps

Here is the process, in order, with the tool to use at each step. Tick as you go: the tool below shows you the time left and the details of the current step.

1. Record your baseline (10 minutes)

Before looking for problems, write down where you stand in Search Console: organic clicks over the last three months, number of indexed pages, rankings on your ten priority queries. This snapshot is what will let you prove the effect of your fixes. It is also the step everyone skips, and the one most missed when a budget has to be justified six months later.

2. Check indexing (20 minutes)

In Search Console, open the Page indexing report. Look at the number of indexed pages, then above all at the list of non-indexed pages and the reason attached to each. The reasons to handle first: pages excluded by a noindex tag when they should be visible, pages crawled but not indexed, and server errors. A non-indexed page cannot rank, however good its content.

3. Crawl the site (30 minutes)

Run Screaming Frog if your site has fewer than 500 URLs, and Ahrefs Webmaster Tools or Bing's Site Scan beyond that. Then note four things: response codes other than 200, missing or duplicate title tags, pages without an H1, and the depth of important pages. A strategic page five clicks from the homepage is a page search engines treat as secondary. To go further on this block, my technical SEO audit checklist details every check.

4. Cross-check the two lists (20 minutes)

This is the most profitable step of the whole audit. Export, on one side, the pages found by the crawler and, on the other, the pages that get impressions in Search Console (Performance report, Pages tab). Compare them. Pages the crawler found but that get no impressions are your invisible pages: either they are not indexed, or they do not answer any query. Either way, you have just found where your potential is hiding.

5. Measure speed and mobile (20 minutes)

Run your three most important pages through PageSpeed Insights and look at field data first. The most common and easiest wins: compress images and serve them in WebP or AVIF, defer non-essential scripts, and declare image dimensions so the page does not shift while loading.

6. Rank by impact (20 minutes)

You now have a list of problems. Do not fix them in the order you found them. Rank them like this:

1. Whatever blocks indexing.
2. Whatever affects many pages at once, typically a template.
3. Whatever concerns your most profitable pages.
4. The rest.

This ranking is what turns a list of alerts into an action plan. To lay it out, use my SEO audit report example as a model: a table in which each finding is rated on impact, number of pages affected and effort. If your business lives on local customers, add the Google Business Profile to the process with my local SEO audit checklist.

What a free SEO audit cannot see

Free tools find most technical problems. They leave three topics in the dark, and these often weigh more:

• Competition. Why a competitor's page outranks you on a query: topic coverage, links, better-served intent. Free versions do not let you analyze a site other than your own, or only very little.
• Business value. No tool knows which page brings you customers. Yet that is the criterion that decides the order of fixes.
• The causes of a drop. A tool records a decline; explaining it means cross-referencing history, algorithm updates and market changes.

When to move to a paid audit

Three signals show that the free audit has given all it can:

• Everything is green and traffic is flat. The problem is no longer technical: it is semantic or competitive.
• Traffic dropped with no visible cause. Then you need an investigation, not a list of alerts.
• You do not know where to start. This is the most common case: the diagnosis is done, but prioritizing takes experience.

In all three cases, what you are buying is not data but judgment. What drives the price of an SEO audit is detailed in a dedicated article, and my SEO audit is quoted on request.

Written by

Anthony Courtin

SEO, GEO & AI automation consultant

I help small businesses and independent professionals with their visibility (Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity) and with the real-world use of AI at work. I work on-site with companies to train teams and rethink processes. Everything I write here, I use in client work.

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