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SEO and AEO audit

What the audit checks

The 38 issue types the SEO and AEO audit looks for, grouped in its seven scoring categories, with the severity and the rule behind each one.

4 min read

The audit looks for 38 types of issue in seven categories. By the end of this page you will know every check and what triggers it.

Each issue carries a severity. Critical issues can keep a page out of search. Warning issues cost real ranking or reach. Notice issues are smaller wins. A check that finds nothing counts as passed.

Technical SEO

This category carries 22 of the 100 points.

  • Page blocked from indexing (noindex): critical. The page carries a robots meta tag that tells search engines to skip it.
  • robots.txt blocks all crawlers: critical. Your robots.txt disallows the whole site for every crawler.
  • No robots.txt found: warning. The site has no robots.txt file at its root.
  • No XML sitemap found: warning. Neither /sitemap.xml nor /sitemap_index.xml answers.
  • HTTP does not redirect to HTTPS: warning. The plain http:// address loads without sending visitors to https://.
  • Missing viewport meta tag: warning. The page fails mobile-friendly checks without it.
  • Missing canonical link: notice. The page names no canonical address.
  • Missing html lang attribute: notice. The page does not declare its language.
  • Missing security headers: notice. The first page lacks two or more of four common security headers.

Content quality

This category carries 23 points.

  • Thin content (under 120 words): warning. The page has fewer than 120 words of text.
  • No outbound links to sources: notice. None of the audited pages link to another site. This check needs at least three pages.
  • Few referring domains: notice. Fewer than ten other domains link to your site.
  • High spam score on the backlink profile: warning. The links pointing at your site look spammy.

On-page SEO

This category carries 20 points.

  • Missing page title: critical. The page has no title tag.
  • Title longer than 65 characters: warning. Search results cut long titles short.
  • Very short page title: notice. The title has fewer than 15 characters.
  • Duplicate page titles: warning. Two or more pages share one title.
  • Missing meta description: warning. Search engines then write their own snippet.
  • Meta description longer than 165 characters: notice. Long descriptions get cut mid-sentence.
  • Duplicate meta descriptions: notice. Two or more pages share one description.
  • Missing H1 heading: warning. The page has no main heading.
  • More than one H1 heading: notice. The page has several main headings.
  • Missing Open Graph tags: notice. Shared links show a bare address without a title and description.

Schema and structured data

This category carries 10 points.

  • No structured data found: warning. No audited page carries JSON-LD markup.
  • Invalid JSON-LD block: warning. A structured data block does not parse, so search engines ignore it.
  • Article schema without an image: warning. Article markup needs an image for rich results.
  • Product schema without aggregateRating: notice. Star ratings in results need rating data.
  • Deprecated HowTo schema: notice. Google no longer shows HowTo rich results.

Performance

This category carries 10 points.

  • Slow server responses (median over 1.5s): warning. The typical page takes longer than 1.5 seconds to arrive. This check needs at least three pages.
  • Very large HTML document: notice. The page HTML weighs 350 KB or more.
  • Lighthouse performance: a real mobile Lighthouse test of your homepage. A score under 50 is a warning. A score under 90 is a notice.

AI search readiness

This category carries 10 points.

  • AI crawlers blocked in robots.txt: warning. Your robots.txt shuts out GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, PerplexityBot or OAI-SearchBot from the whole site.
  • No FAQ schema (AEO): notice. No audited page carries FAQ markup.
  • No question-and-answer blocks (AEO): notice. No page has a heading that asks a question.
  • No llms.txt file: notice. The site has no llms.txt summary for AI engines.

The crawler check reads robots.txt only. It flags a bot only when robots.txt blocks it from the whole site.

Images and media

This category carries 5 points.

  • Images without alt text: warning. Some images on the page have no description.
  • Images without width and height: notice. The layout shifts while those images load.
  • Missing og:image: notice. The page has Open Graph tags but no preview image.

Live data checks

Three checks use outside data: referring domains, the spam score and Lighthouse. They also fill the Authority and speed · live data panel. When that data is not available, the audit runs without them.

Ranking keywords and estimated monthly visits in that panel are measured for US search in English. Your project market does not change them.

What the audit does not check

The audit does not follow redirect chains or test status codes. Your link scan finds broken links, as How links are classified explains. The audit also does not compare structured data with the visible text of a page.

Read the triage How the audit score is built, what the biggest lever and the category bars mean, and how to work through the fix queue one issue at a time. Run an audit Start an SEO and AEO audit of your whole site or one page, see what it needs first, and how many audits and pages your plan covers. How a scan works How a scan finds the pages on your site, which links it checks, what it skips, and how many pages each plan covers in one scan.