Site audit

Site audit crawls your project's domain the way a search engine would and flags the technical problems that hold rankings back: broken pages, missing titles and meta descriptions, redirect chains, slow or oversized pages, canonical and hreflang mistakes, and more. Every audit ends with a single health score from 0 to 100, so you can see at a glance whether your site is getting better or worse.

It's built for site owners who want a regular technical check-up without learning a desktop crawler, and for agencies who need a quick, exportable list of fixes for each client. You'll find it under Project → Site audit.

How it works

When you start an audit, serp.ac crawls your project's domain starting from the homepage (https://yourdomain/):

• It respects robots.txt. Pages your robots.txt blocks are skipped. If robots.txt sets a crawl delay, the crawler slows down and fetches one page at a time.
• It uses your sitemap. Sitemaps listed in robots.txt (or /sitemap.xml if none are listed) are used to discover pages. Pages found through links are crawled first, then the remaining sitemap URLs.
• It stays on your site. Only pages on the same host are crawled (with or without www). Images, PDFs, scripts, stylesheets and other files are not crawled as pages.
• It stops at your plan's page limit. Each audit crawls up to:

Plan	Pages per audit
Starter	100
Pro	500
Agency	2,000

Audits run in a queue, so a new audit may show Audit queued — starting soon for a little while before crawling begins. While it runs, the page shows a progress bar (for example "120 / 500 pages") and refreshes itself every few seconds — you don't need to reload.

Weekly re-audits: once a project has had its first audit, serp.ac re-audits it automatically every week (when no audit has run in the last 7 days). You only need to start the first one yourself.

Step by step

1. Open your project and go to Site audit in the sidebar (or use this link).
2. Click Start audit. You need edit access to the project, and your plan must be active.
3. Wait while the crawl runs. You can leave the page; the audit keeps running in the background.
4. Check the health score and the Errors, Warnings and Notices counts at the top.
5. In Issues by type, click a row to see exactly which pages have that issue.
6. Switch between the Issues and Pages tabs. In Issues, filter by All, Errors, Warnings or Notices. In Pages, see every crawled URL with its status code, title, word count, response time and number of issues.
7. Fix the problems on your site, starting with errors.
8. Click Re-run audit to confirm the fixes, or wait for the weekly re-audit.
9. Click Export CSV to download the full results — handy for sharing with a developer.

What the numbers mean

Health score (0–100). Each crawled page starts at 100 and loses points for every issue type it has: −25 for an error, −8 for a warning, −2 for a notice (never below 0). An issue type counts once per page, so ten images without alt text on one page is one warning, not ten. The site's health score is the average of all page scores, rounded. The score is shown in green from 80, amber from 50 to 79, and red below 50. Under the score you'll see how much it moved since the previous audit, and Health score trend charts it over time.

Errors / Warnings / Notices. The number of issues found across all pages, grouped by severity. In Issues by type, the number next to each issue is how many pages are affected.

Issue types and severities:

Severity	Issues
Error	Client error (4xx), Server error (5xx), Page could not be fetched, Broken internal links, Missing title, Mixed content (http on https)
Warning	Redirect chain (>1 hop), Duplicate title, Missing meta description, Duplicate meta description, Missing H1, Noindex page, Images without alt text, Slow page (>1.5s), Large page (>2 MB), Hreflang missing return link
Notice	Title too long (over 60 characters), Title too short (under 30 characters), Multiple H1 tags, Missing canonical, Canonical points to another page, Thin content (<200 words), Hreflang without self-reference, Orphan page (in sitemap, not linked)

A few details worth knowing:

• Images with an empty alt="" are treated as decorative and are not flagged — only a missing alt attribute counts.
• Duplicate titles and descriptions are only checked between indexable pages (status 2xx, not noindex).
• Thin content isn't reported for noindex pages.
• An orphan page is one listed in your sitemap that no crawled page links to.

Pages tab. Status codes are colored (2xx green, 3xx amber, 4xx/5xx red); redirects show their target. Response times over 1.5 seconds are highlighted.

CSV export. One row per page with URL, status, redirect target, title, meta description, H1, canonical, word count, response time, size, error/warning/notice counts and the list of issues. Export CSV downloads the latest audit; in Audit history you can download the CSV of any earlier finished audit.

Tips

• Fix errors first — each error type costs a page 25 points, so a handful of broken pages pulls the score down fast.
• If the audit fails with "No pages could be crawled (blocked by robots.txt?)", check that your robots.txt doesn't block all crawlers.
• If it says the homepage redirects outside your domain (for example to a different domain), update the project domain in Project settings so it matches the address your site actually uses.
• Noindex pages are listed as warnings so you can double-check they're intentional. If they are, you can ignore them.
• After a big release, click Re-run audit instead of waiting for the weekly run.

FAQ

How often is my site audited?

You start the first audit yourself. After that, serp.ac re-audits the project automatically every week. You can also click Re-run audit any time an audit isn't already queued or running.

Will I be notified when an audit finishes?

Yes, through the "Site audit finished / health dropped" alert (email and Telegram by default). You always get a notification for a project's first audit. After that, you're only notified when the health score drops by 5 points or more, or when the number of errors goes up — so routine weekly audits don't flood your inbox. Change channels in notification settings.

Why did the crawl stop before it reached all my pages?

Each audit stops at your plan's page limit (100, 500 or 2,000 pages). Pages blocked by robots.txt are skipped, and a crawl also ends after about 25 minutes. Upgrading your plan raises the page limit for future audits.

Why did my audit fail with "Audit was interrupted"?

Very occasionally an audit is interrupted before it can finish. Just click Re-run audit. Your previous successful audit stays visible in the meantime.

Can team members run audits?

Members with edit access can start and re-run audits. Viewers can see results and download the CSV, but they don't see the start button.

Related guides

• Notifications
• Reports & sharing
• AI readiness
• Google Search Console