Free SEO audit: find what holds your site back in search
A free SEO audit shows what keeps your pages out of search or low in it: crawling and indexing, titles and markup, speed on phones. Fox reads the site as a search engine does and returns errors and recommendations.
Want to talk your site's search problems over first? Ask FoxWhat a free SEO audit is, and what it cannot judge
No automated check can tell whether your page is the best answer next to the pages ranking now, how strong your links are, or how often people search for your brand. Any SEO score is the tool's own; Google publishes none. The same run also checks the offer and the ways to get in touch, and that side is the subject of the website audit page.
A free automated check
One site and a sample of its pages, read in minutes to find what you can fix today: a blocked page, a broken server answer, a missing title.
A full-site crawl
Every address on the site, for a large site or before a migration. Expect to need a crawler and some skill to read the output.
A manual or agency audit
Here a specialist judges your queries and links against the market, over days and for a fee.
How the SEO audit runs
Fox only reads: it fetches public pages as a search engine would and changes nothing on the site. There is no tag to install.
Give the address
Any public site works: your own, a client's or a rival's.
Say whose site it is
Fox shows the site's card and asks whether it is yours, a client's or someone else's.
Fox reads it from outside
Up to 25 pages, plus robots.txt and the sitemaps. Fox records the server's answers and redirects, reads the markup, gets speed data for real visitors on phones and checks the results for the niche's queries, in a few minutes at most.
Get the report
Your score with the Errors and Recommendations lists, each item with its fix. Where a script draws the whole site, the checks that need the page text are marked not measured.
What the SEO audit checks
Grouped as the report shows them, plus one card for what this check leaves out. The offer and the leads are in the same report; the website audit covers them.
Indexability
Server answers and redirects, HTTPS, the www and bare addresses, noindex and canonical tags, robots.txt and the sitemaps. Also broken links between the pages read, and pages buried many clicks from the home page.
On-page
Each page's title and description, with duplicates; the H1; image alt text; the mobile viewport. Also the language and hreflang, social previews and structured data.
Content
Pages with very little text, and articles missing subheadings or a date and author. Whether a page answers its query as well as the ranking pages is judged in the deep audit.
Speed
Fox takes the three Core Web Vitals for real visitors on phones: LCP for loading the first screen, INP for response to a tap, CLS for layout shift. Google counts a page as good at up to 2.5 seconds for LCP, 200 milliseconds for INP and 0.1 for CLS; together they are a modest ranking signal.
Search visibility
Whether the site comes first for its own name and reaches the top 10 for the niche's buyer queries, and whether each page read makes the top 10 for its own query. This is a snapshot of today's results; to compare rivals side by side, run a competitor analysis.
Not checked here
Backlinks, rank tracking, a crawl of thousands of pages. Nor what AI answers say about you, which changes from run to run. Google's AI Overviews draw on the normal Google index, and this check tells you whether your pages are open to it.
Crawled is not indexed
A search engine first fetches a page (crawling), then decides whether to keep it in its index (indexing). Each step has its own switch. Crawl budget is a concern mainly for very large or fast-changing sites.
robots.txt controls crawling
Disallow rules stop crawlers fetching a page, yet they do not take the page out of the index: a blocked address can still appear in results when other pages link to it.
noindex keeps a page out
To remove a page from the index, put a noindex rule in the page or in the server's header, and leave the page open to crawling. Blocked by robots.txt, a crawler never sees the noindex.
A sitemap is optional
Search engines use it to find pages, most of all on a large or new site, and it guarantees nothing. Small sites with good internal links are found without one, so Fox lists a missing sitemap as a recommendation.
A canonical is a hint
The tag tells Google which of several similar addresses you prefer. Google may choose another, for example when your redirects or internal links point elsewhere.
Server answers come first
A page that keeps answering with an error drops out of the index, and long redirect chains slow crawling down. Search Console's Page indexing report and URL Inspection show Google's own view of each page.
What counts on the page, and what does not
Titles and descriptions shape how a page appears in results, and markup can add to it. Here is what each one does, and what free checkers wrongly sell as a ranking factor.
Title
Google shows as much of a title as fits the width of the result, so put the key words near the start. Google also rewrites some titles in results, for example when the title does not describe the page.
Description
The meta description is not a ranking factor, yet it shapes the snippet and can win the click. Google may also write its own from the page's text.
Headings and alt text
One H1 a page is a good habit for readers, not a Google rule. Write alt text for images that carry information, so search and screen readers know what they show.
Structured data
Markup can make a page eligible for rich results and never guarantees them. The markup has to describe what the visible page says.
Content
Google has no preferred word count, and stuffing a page with a keyword breaks its spam rules. Thin means little value for the query; the free check flags very short pages as a place to look.
A score, then two lists
Fox's rules are public, so you can see why a page lost points.
Fox's scale, not Google's
Strong from 75, room to improve from 50, critical below that. No total is shown when too little could be measured.
Errors, then recommendations
An error costs you search traffic: a page that does not open or is blocked, a missing title, a broken link. Recommendations make pages stronger. Each item names its cause and the fix, as a task on your project map.
Clean pages
In indexability and on-page, each page loses points for its own errors and warnings, an error more than a warning. When a template is broken, one error repeats across many pages; the report shows the share of clean pages.
Not measured is not a minus
A source that did not answer, or a site drawn by a script, is marked not measured and lowers nothing; neither does a notice. Weights differ for a local and an online site.
What to fix first
Start with what blocks access and end with the copy. When the same error repeats, fix the template once instead of every page. Technical items can go to a developer.
Access
Pages that do not open, and noindex or robots.txt rules that should not be there.
HTTPS and redirects
One secure address per page, reached from the old ones in a single hop.
Titles and headings
The title and description, then the H1, on the pages that bring visitors.
Speed
The templates that carry the most visitors, on phones first.
Content, then a re-check
Then content against the query. Run the audit again after each fix: the score changes at once, while Google has to recrawl first, and rankings move slowly and with no guarantee. Confirm the effect in Search Console.
Check it yourself, or go further
One run is enough for a small site. Run it again around a launch or a redesign, when traffic or indexed pages drop, and after every fix; no check of this kind affects rankings.
Google's own free tools
Search Console shows Google's data for your own site: Page indexing, URL Inspection, Performance. Google's speed reports measure any page. They are the reference, though they give no order of work.
A free desktop crawler
Reads a whole site up to a cap on addresses; setting it up and reading the output takes some skill.
The crawler of a paid suite
Thousands of pages plus backlinks and rank tracking, usually for a monthly fee.
An agency audit
An expert reads the site against your queries and market, over days and at the highest cost.
When a free check is not enough
In the paid plans, your project map has an SEO branch under Marketing. Each task there runs as a job with its own report, spends the plan's limits and ends with one message from Fox.
Initial audit
The baseline of the site and its search: a crawl, the queries and keywords, the clusters and competitors, and a sample audit of pages.
Full audit
Goes deeper into the site's pages, with each finding as a task on the map.
Expand keywords and clusters
More of the queries your buyers type, grouped into topics a page can own.
Expand and improve articles
New articles for missing topics and rewrites of pages that trail the results, by the method our own pages are built with: the results studied, rivals' pages read block by block, the best block taken per topic.
Need a deeper look?
The SEO line runs inside the paid plans, within each plan's limits. Start with the free audit to see where the site stands.
Questions
Is the free SEO audit really free? Is there a limit?
Yes. Your first checks of any kind need no account (the line under the field says how many are left). After sign-in there is one shared weekly limit, and the SEO line comes with the paid plans on the pricing page.
Does it check my whole site?
Up to 25 pages, found through the home page's links and the sitemaps, plus robots.txt. That sample is enough to find errors that repeat across templates; for a full crawl, see the other kinds of check above.
Is the SEO score Google's?
No. Google has no SEO score, and any tool's score is that tool's own; Fox's rules are on this page.
Will running the audit affect my rankings?
No. Fox only reads public pages, as a visitor does, and changes nothing on the site.
Why do my speed numbers differ from other tools?
A lab test loads a page once on a simulated device, while real-visitor data comes from actual visits over several weeks. Fox uses real-visitor data on phones, the kind Search Console's Core Web Vitals report shows for your own site. An older tool may still show First Input Delay; INP replaced it in March 2024.
Does it show where I rank, or my visibility in AI search?
You get a snapshot: first for your own name, the top 10 for the niche's buyer queries, with no tracking over time. AI answers vary by run and place, so no free check measures them; Google's AI Overviews draw on the normal Google index, and the audit checks that your pages are open to it.
An llms.txt file is optional, and no AI search engine has confirmed using it.
Is an SEO audit the same as a website audit?
Not quite. A website audit grades the whole site as a customer meets it, search included; this page covers the search side. One run of Fox gives you both.