The Free SEO Audit: What Must Be In It

An SEO audit is an inspection of your site against the criteria a search engine already uses to judge it. A real audit delivers three things: a measured score, a list of faults sorted by impact, and evidence for each fault, meaning a specific URL and a specific number. If even one of those three is missing, it is not an audit, it is a sales pitch. In the Georgian market a "free audit" usually means a form, and what arrives after you fill it in is a phone call rather than a report. The inspection has seven dimensions: content and E-E-A-T, on-page, technical health, Core Web Vitals, structured data, architecture, and off-page. Each carries a weight, and a single critical fault, a leftover noindex for instance, caps the entire score. Five of these checks you can run yourself, free, in half an hour. The rest needs a crawler.

"Get a free SEO audit" sits on almost every agency button in this market. Click, fill the form, and the experience is the same: a call instead of a report. There is no audit yet, and the conversation is already about buying.

What a real audit contains

An audit is not prose, it is arithmetic. Here are the seven dimensions and their weights on a 100 point scale. If the report does not show the weights, then "your SEO is weak" is an opinion, not a measurement.

And every fault in the report needs four fields: what was found, where (the exact URL), what it costs you, and how it gets fixed. A fifth field is confidence: confirmed, likely, or hypothesis. An agency that labels every one of its claims "confirmed" either measures everything or measures nothing.

Five checks you can run yourself in 30 minutes

1. Indexing

Type site:yoursite.ge into Google. If the page count is far below what you actually have, the problem is indexing, not copy. Full list: the technical SEO audit checklist.

2. AI crawler access

Open yoursite.ge/robots.txt and look for GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended. If they are blocked, your site does not exist for answer engines, no matter how good the writing is. In detail: why your site is invisible to ChatGPT.

3. What an answer engine actually sees

Disable JavaScript in your browser and reload your home page. Whatever remains on screen is exactly what reaches an AI crawler, because most of them do not execute scripts. Googlebot does, they do not. If the part that makes you worth quoting has vanished, you are not in the answer.

4. Speed, on real data

Run your URL through PageSpeed Insights, which is free and needs no login. Google publishes the thresholds: LCP within 2.5 seconds, INP at or under 200 milliseconds, CLS at or under 0.1, each measured at the 75th percentile of real page loads. INP replaced FID in 2024. More: site speed and Core Web Vitals.

5. The target phrase in five places

Pick one query you want to rank for. Open the page source and look for that phrase in five places: title, H1, first paragraph, meta description, and URL. If it is missing from three of the five, the page is not built for that query. Related: keyword research in Georgian search.

The heaviest line: who stands behind the text

Content and E-E-A-T carries the largest weight in the table, 25 points. The technical layer is noisier, but this is where most value leaks away. The check is simple and asks two questions: is there an author name on the page, and is there a date. If you cannot find either, neither can a search engine.

In the Georgian market this is the usual picture: the blog names an author, the service page does not, as though a commercial page needed no author. In reality that is precisely the page where the reader most wants to know who is talking. See Google SEO in Georgia and what SEO is.

Structured data: are you speaking the machine's language

Schema markup tells a search engine what a human already understands by looking at the page: this is an article, this is a question and answer, this is a business at this address. An audit checks two things: whether schema exists at all, and whether it describes what the page actually contains. The second is the dangerous one. Schema describing a question and answer that is not on the page is not merely useless, it destroys trust.

Details: schema markup for AEO. And how traffic from answer engines is measured: measuring AEO.

What you cannot check yourself

All five checks above concern a single page. A site, however, is a graph of pages, and the graph is where the invisible faults hide: titles duplicated across a dozen pages, orphan pages with no internal link pointing at them, redirect chains, one-way hreflang pairs, and the question of which pages accumulate internal authority and which bleed it.

That needs a crawler that walks the site page by page and builds the graph. It cannot be done by hand. This is the part an audit is paid for, and it is exactly the part a phone call will never give you.

Then there is everything that happens outside your site: who links to you, what is written about you, and how your business profile looks on the map. That is part of an audit too, measured with different tools: link building without spam and local SEO in the age of AI search.

The call and the report, side by side

The conclusion

A free audit is not a bad thing. A bad thing is an audit that is not an audit. If they hand you no file, compute no score, and cannot name the URL of a single fault, no inspection took place. The five checks above are free. Run them today. The rest needs a crawler.

We run the audit as an actual audit: a computed score across all seven dimensions, faults sorted by impact, Core Web Vitals from real field data, and a separate pass for answer engines. Not a call. The report. SEO and LLM-SEO, or visibility inside answer engines.

Primary sources

• web.dev, Core Web Vitals, the LCP, INP and CLS thresholds
• Google PageSpeed Insights, the free speed check
• Google, SEO Starter Guide, indexing and timelines

Frequently asked questions

Is a free SEO audit really free?

Usually only the form is free. A real inspection that walks the site page by page and builds the graph takes work, so it is rarely given away. The five single-page checks above genuinely are free, and you can do them today.

How do I tell an audit from a sales pitch?

Three signs are enough. Did they hand you a file. Does each fault carry a specific URL and a specific number. Can you see which problem is the heaviest. If the answer to all three is no, that was an offer, not an inspection.

How often does a site need an audit?

A full audit once a year, or whenever the site goes through a large change: a redesign, a URL restructure, a new language. The five free checks are light enough to run once a quarter.

What does it mean that one fault caps the whole score?

If a page carries a leftover noindex, or the site does not run on HTTPS, it is unreachable to a search engine. An unreachable page scores zero regardless of how good the writing is, so that fault gets fixed first and everything else is discussed afterwards.

Why check AI crawlers if Google is what matters?

Googlebot executes JavaScript, most AI crawlers do not. So a site can look complete in Google and arrive empty at an answer engine. That is a separate check, and an ordinary SEO audit does not cover it.