What it does
Every check in an audit belongs to one of eight categories. The categories roll up into four disciplines, which is what you see at the top of the report. This page is the reference for what sits underneath.
The categories
Titles & Meta (On-page)
Title tags and meta descriptions across every crawled page: missing, duplicated, too long, too short, or not describing the page. These are the two things a searcher reads before deciding whether to click, and duplicates are the single most common finding on a site nobody has audited before.
Content (On-page)
Whether pages have enough substance to rank: word count against page type, thin pages, missing or duplicated H1s, heading structure, and pages that exist but say nothing. A page can be technically perfect and still have nothing to rank for.
Links (On-page)
Internal linking: orphan pages nothing points to, broken links, and how link equity flows through the site. An orphan page is invisible no matter how good it is.
Crawling & Indexing (Technical)
Whether search engines can reach and index your pages at all: robots.txt, meta robots directives, sitemap presence and validity, and pages blocked from indexing. Everything else is irrelevant if this fails.
Canonicalization (Technical)
Canonical tags, and whether duplicate versions of a page point at one preferred URL. Gets messy on sites with parameters, pagination, or both a www and non-www version live.
Security (Technical)
HTTPS, certificate validity, mixed content, and security headers. Ranking signal, and a trust signal to anyone who looks at the address bar.
Structured Data (Technical)
Schema.org markup: what is present, what validates, and what is missing for the page type. Structured data is how a page becomes eligible for rich results, and increasingly how an AI model understands what a page is about.
GEO / AI Search (AI)
Whether AI search engines can use your site: AI crawler access, llms.txt,
structured data presence, and passage-level citability. This is the newest
category and the one most sites score worst on, because most sites have never
considered it.
Reading the results
Every check reports Pass, Warning, or Fail, and scores in proportion to how much of the crawled site it affects. A category with more checks carries more weight in its discipline score.
Categories with nothing measurable show a dash rather than a zero. That is not a penalty.
Limits and cost
- Checks run against the pages actually crawled, up to 200 per audit. A finding says "on the pages we crawled", never "on your whole site".
- Off-page (backlinks) is not one of the eight. It needs a paid backlink data subscription that is not enabled, and the report says so rather than pretending otherwise.
When it goes wrong
A check fails on a page you cannot find. Check whether the crawler reached a staging URL, a parameter variant, or a paginated version. The report gives the exact URL it saw.
A category you care about shows nothing. It usually means the crawl was too small. Check the page count on the report header.