Running an SEO audit.
Pick a depth, pick a scope, press Run. Your first audit on each brand is free — and no audit ever runs unless you ask for it.
An SEO audit crawls your own website, scores it out of 100, and turns every failure into a fix card with numbered steps and copy-paste code. Your first audit on each brand is free. This page covers the setup popup — the three decisions it asks you for, and which ones actually matter.
What you need first
One thing: a website URL on your brand. If there isn't one, the tab tells you so instead of showing a score, because there is nothing to crawl. Add it under Brand → Profile.
You do not need Google Search Console to run an audit. Connecting it raises your score's ceiling — it switches on a fifth pillar — but the audit runs happily without it. Why that matters →
Depth: Essential, Standard, Deep
The first row of the setup popup. Three buttons; Standard is selected by default, and it's the one the rest of these docs assume.
- Essential — skips the Core Web Vitals step entirely. Faster and cheaper, and the whole Core Web Vitals section of your report stays empty. The Technical pillar reweights around the gap rather than scoring you zero for it.
- Standard — the default, and what everything in this documentation describes: the five pillars, Core Web Vitals, the device renders.
- Deep — the highest depth setting, and the one with the highest base cost.
Unless you specifically don't want to wait for the performance test, leave it on Standard. Essential is a speed trade — you lose Core Web Vitals, which is a high-severity check and a confirmed Google ranking signal. What Core Web Vitals are →
Core pages vs Specific pages
The second row. Two very different modes.
Core pages (the default)
We find your pages ourselves. In order, we look at your robots.txt for a sitemap directive, then the conventional sitemap paths, then follow every child sitemap of a sitemap index, then read the links on your homepage. If your homepage is built in JavaScript and the raw HTML has almost no links in it, we render it properly and try again. If we still have too few pages, we crawl one level deeper.
Then we rank the pool for coverage rather than taking the first N we found. Your homepage always goes first, and the rest are picked round-robin across the sections of your site — so a 20-page audit of a 300-page site samples your services, your blog and your locations instead of auditing twenty blog posts.
We deliberately skip your utility pages — cart, checkout, login, signup, account, search results, admin, feeds. They're thin, they're often set to noindex on purpose, and auditing them would burn your page budget to tell you your basket page has no meta description. Legal pages like privacy and terms are real content and are not skipped.
Specific pages
Switch to Specific pages and you get a box. Paste up to 20 URLs, one per line. We audit exactly those, in that order, with no discovery and no filtering — if you paste your cart page, we will audit your cart page.
This is the mode for checking work. You rewrote six service pages; audit those six, see what moved. Site-level checks (does robots.txt exist, is there a sitemap) still run honestly against your domain, so they don't fail just because you didn't paste them.
How many pages
In Core-pages mode you get a row of chips: 5 · 10 · 20 · 50 · 100 · 200. Chips above your plan's ceiling are greyed out and can't be picked, and the line underneath tells you what that ceiling is. The default is 20. The per-plan page limits →
More pages is not automatically better. Twenty well-chosen pages will surface every site-wide problem you have; the next hundred mostly confirm them. Start at 20, fix what comes back, and go wide later when you want a complete inventory of affected URLs.
The whole crawl runs inside a fixed time budget. On a large or slow site, we may not reach every page you asked for — so the report says “Audited 63 of 200 pages” rather than quietly pretending. Pages we never fetched are excluded from scoring entirely; they can't drag your score down. More on that →
What happens when you press Run
The popup cross-fades into a live progress screen with three phases:
Auditing your pages
We fetch your pages as plain HTML and run every check against them. No AI is involved anywhere in this — the same page always scores the same.
Measuring Core Web Vitals
We look for real-user performance data on your site, and fall back to a lab test if there isn't any. On an Essential audit this row doesn't appear at all.
Rendering desktop + mobile
We capture your homepage as a browser actually renders it, on both a laptop and a phone. See what that gives you →
The whole run usually takes one to two minutes, and the countdown on screen is a comfort cue rather than a promise. Two things worth knowing:
- You can't Escape out of it mid-run. The audit is charged and persisting; closing the window halfway would leave you paying for a report you never got. Escape works on the setup form, not during the run.
- If the connection drops, the attempt ends. We stop rather than silently reconnecting and re-running a paid audit. You'll land back on the setup form with an error, and you decide whether to try again.
When it finishes, the modal closes and the report is already fully populated — score, fix cards, search preview, Core Web Vitals and the device renders. Nothing loads in afterwards.
What it costs
Your first audit on each brand is free. The button says so — Run free audit — and the cost panel reads Free. That's per brand, not per account: add a second brand and its first audit is free too.
After that, an audit is priced on the pages we actually read, plus a base that depends on the depth you chose. Two consequences, both in your favour:
- A page that 404s isn't billed. You pay for pages that came back, not pages we asked for.
- The popup quotes you before you commit. The exact figure is on the Run button. If your balance won't cover it, the button is disabled and says so — an audit can't half-run and leave you short.
Exact rates live on the credits page, because they're set centrally and we'd rather not print a number here that drifts out of date. See what everything costs →
Audits do not refresh themselves
An SEO audit runs only when you press the button. There is no weekly re-crawl, no overnight job, no automatic refresh when you publish something. The score on your screen is a photograph of the day you took it — if that was two months ago, it is two months out of date. Re-run it yourself after you've made changes.
That's a deliberate choice: audits cost credits, and quietly spending your credits on a schedule you didn't ask for would be the wrong default. The trade is that keeping the number current is your job.
The score hero keeps the last six audits as a sparkline, with the change since your previous run — so when you do re-audit after a fix, you can see immediately whether it worked.