SEOPage

SEO page audit

Find out why your page isn't being cited by AI.

Send us one page and the search you want it to win. A person reads it against the results that are beating you and emails you what is actually wrong, within 24 hours. Free.

Get My Free SEO Page Audit

29-point audit · human-reviewed · no account, no card

Why this isn't another scanner

Every free SEO audit tool gives you a score. None of them will tell you why you're losing the search.

What a scanner returns

A number out of 100, a red flag on four images missing alt text, a warning that your meta description is eleven characters too long, and a suggestion to improve page speed. All true. None of it explains why the page above you is winning.

What a person returns

That the query is a comparison search and your page is a brochure. That the three pages beating you all answer a question you never mention. That your business name appears once, in an image. That is not a score. That is the reason.

A page can score 82 out of 100 and still never rank, because the score measures compliance and the ranking measures whether you answered the question. We run the automated checks too. Then someone who has built landing pages for a decade reads the page and tells you the part a crawler can't see.

Get your free page audit

One page, one search, reviewed by a person. In your inbox within 24 hours. No account, no card, no call.

We audit a limited number of pages a day · first come, first served

The checklist

The 29-point SEO page audit checklist we run

This is the whole thing, in the order we work through it. Take it and run it yourself if you'd rather. Most audit checklists published online stop at the technical layer, which is the layer least likely to be why your page is losing.

5 stages · 29checks · keep scrolling

SEO page audit checklistStage 01 of 05

Intent and competition

Most pages don't lose on technique. They lose because they answer a different question than the one being asked.

5 checks in this stage

  • Search intent: whether the page delivers the dominant intent behind the query, or something adjacent

  • Format match: how the ranking pages are shaped: guide, service page, comparison, tool, listing

  • Coverage gaps: subtopics every ranking page treats that yours never mentions

  • Split focus: whether one page is trying to win two different searches at once

  • Cannibalization: other pages on your own site competing for the same term

SEO page audit checklistStage 02 of 05

The elements search engines read first

The unglamorous layer, and the one most often broken on pages that have had money spent on them.

7 checks in this stage

  • Title tag: keyword position, length, truncation risk, and whether Google is rewriting it

  • Meta description: written or auto-generated, sized to display in full, and worth a click

  • H1: present, singular, and matching the search rather than the brand

  • Heading outline: H2s and H3s in logical order, question-shaped, carrying real subtopics

  • URL slug: readable, keyword-bearing, free of dates and session junk

  • Images: file names and alt text, including whether the main image is described at all

  • Canonical tag: present, self-referencing, not pointing somewhere unintended

SEO page audit checklistStage 03 of 05

The content itself

Word count is a symptom, not a metric. What matters is whether the page settles the question.

6 checks in this stage

  • Opening 100 words: the primary keyword placed in a sentence a human would actually write

  • Depth: subtopic coverage measured against the ranking set, not length

  • Answer-first structure: whether the first paragraph answers, or merely warms up

  • Entity clarity: business name, service, and service area stated unambiguously

  • Freshness: a dateModified that reflects reality rather than a build timestamp

  • Internal links: what points here, where it points, and whether the page is orphaned

Google decides whether to rank you. An assistant decides whether to repeat you. Those are two different tests, and most pages have only ever been built for the first.

Stage 04 · AI citation readiness

SEO page audit checklistStage 04 of 05

AI citation readiness

The half most checklists still skip, and the half that decides whether an assistant can name you at all.

6 checks in this stage

  • Self-contained passages: whether paragraphs still make sense lifted out of the page

  • Citable facts: specific numbers and claims rather than adjectives nothing can quote

  • FAQ schema: a question block with matching FAQPage structured data

  • Entity markup: Organization and Service schema, with sameAs links that tie you together

  • Crawler access: robots.txt rules for GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and Google-Extended

  • Current citations: whether AI Overviews, ChatGPT, or Perplexity name you for your query today

SEO page audit checklistStage 05 of 05

Technical fundamentals

Rare causes of failure, but total ones. Worth five minutes to rule out.

5 checks in this stage

  • Indexability: noindex tags, robots directives, and canonical conflicts

  • Core Web Vitals: LCP, INP, and CLS on mobile against Google's thresholds

  • Mobile rendering: tap-target spacing, and text that forces a pinch to read

  • JavaScript dependence: content that exists only after render, and whether crawlers see it

  • Schema validity: structured-data errors that silently disable rich results

Do it yourself

How to do an SEO page audit in five steps

You do not need a subscription to any of this. You need an afternoon and the discipline to look at the search results before you look at your own page.

01

Search your keyword and read the results

Open the top ten in tabs. Before you look at your own page, work out what the results have in common: the format, the depth, the questions they all answer. That pattern is what Google is rewarding for this query.

02

Compare your page to that pattern, not to a score

List the subtopics every ranking page covers and check them against yours. Missing coverage explains more lost rankings than any technical issue.

03

Check what the crawlers actually get

View source rather than the rendered page. Confirm the title tag, H1, canonical, and body copy exist in the HTML, and that robots.txt isn't blocking the AI crawlers.

04

Ask an assistant your own question

Put the query to ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI mode. Note who gets named and which sources are cited. If a competitor appears and you don't, that is the gap the page has to close.

05

Fix in order of consequence

Intent mismatch first, then coverage, then the elements search engines read, then technical. Reversing that order is how people spend a week on alt text while the page answers the wrong question.

After the audit

An audit tells you what's wrong.
Someone still has to build the page.

If the fixes are small, do them yourself. If the honest answer is that the page needs rebuilding around the search, we do that for $99: researched, written, human-reviewed, in your inbox within 3 hours.

The questions, answered

SEO page audits, explained

What is an SEO page audit?

An SEO page audit is a review of one web page against the specific search it is trying to win. It checks whether the page matches the intent behind the query, whether it covers what the ranking pages cover, whether the title tag, meta description, heading structure, URL, and schema are correct, and whether search engines and AI assistants can crawl, understand, and quote it. A site audit looks at hundreds of pages shallowly; a page audit looks at one page properly.

What is an on-page SEO audit?

An on-page SEO audit examines the elements that live on the page itself: content, title tag, meta description, headings, internal links, images, URL structure, and structured data. It excludes off-page factors like backlinks and brand mentions, which come from other sites. On-page is the half you fully control, which is why it is the sensible place to start.

How do I do an on-page SEO audit myself?

Search your target keyword and study the top ten before you look at your own page, so you can see the format and coverage Google is rewarding. Compare your page's subtopic coverage to that set. View the page source to confirm the title, H1, canonical, and body content are in the HTML rather than generated by JavaScript. Check robots.txt for AI-crawler access. Then ask ChatGPT and Perplexity your own query and see who gets named. Fix in order of consequence: intent, coverage, on-page elements, then technical. The full 29-point checklist we run is published on this page.

What is the difference between an on-page and an off-page SEO audit?

An on-page audit reviews what is on the page: content, structure, metadata, and markup. An off-page audit reviews signals from elsewhere: backlinks, referring domains, brand mentions, and citations. Off-page work is slower and largely outside your control. On-page work is immediate and entirely yours, and for a single page targeting a specific search, it is usually where the ranking is actually being lost.

Are free SEO audit tools any good?

They are good at what they measure, which is a fixed list of technical checks: broken links, missing tags, page speed, image weight. What no automated tool can tell you is whether your page answers the question your customer is asking, or why the page ranking above you is winning. A score of 82/100 on a page that answers the wrong search is a page that will not rank. Run the free tools, then get a human to read the result.

Is the audit really free? What's the catch?

It's free, and the catch is that we hope you like it enough to have us build the page. We audit one page against one search, a person writes the findings, and it lands in your inbox within 24 hours. If the fixes are things you can do yourself, do them yourself and we're glad to have helped. If you would rather we build the page properly, that's $99 and it's in your inbox within 3 hours.

How long does the free audit take?

Within 24 hours. It is slower than the 3-hour promise on paid pages, on purpose: paying customers own the fast queue and a free audit should never be the reason an order slips. We also cap how many we take in a day, because a person reads every one.

Do you audit one page or the whole site?

One page, against one search. That is a deliberate limit. A 200-page crawl produces a report nobody reads and a list of issues nobody prioritizes. One page against one query produces findings you can act on this afternoon. If you need several pages looked at, send the most important one first.

What do I actually receive?

A written audit of your page: what the search is rewarding, where your page diverges from that, the specific on-page problems in priority order, whether AI assistants can currently cite you, and what we would change first. It is prose written by a person, not a PDF of red and green dots.

Ready when you are.

Send the page and the search. We'll tell you what's wrong with it, free, within 24 hours.

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