The Free Website Audit

What the Free Audit Reads

We start at your homepage and follow your own links from page to page, the way a search engine does, up to 500 pages. Every page we reach gets read and scored, and the checks that only make sense across a whole site run too — links that lead nowhere, pages repeating each other, titles used twice, pages nothing links to, and two of your own pages competing for the same search.

There is no plugin, no tracking code, no login and no access to your hosting. What we read is whatever your robots.txt — the file that tells automated readers which pages they may look at — lets a robot read: if it tells robots to stay out, that includes us, and the form says so rather than running the audit. Our page for site owners has the one line that lets us past. If your server fails when we ask it for robots.txt, we read nothing else from it, as search engines do, and the report you get says your server failed and has no score. When that keeps us from reading any page, the audit doesn’t count against your free audits, so once your server answers that request properly, you can ask for it again.

What the Report Contains

The report opens on a score, and the rest of it sits behind a row of links across the top of the page — Overview, Issues, Pages, Categories, Already fine and What we didn’t check. It is not one long page you scroll: each link opens a different part of it, and the part you are reading is the one with a line under it. Reading Your Audit goes through them in order.

Across those sections you get:

• A score for the site, and one for every page we read.
• What to fix, in order — ranked by how much of your score each one is costing, not by how easy it is.
• The fix written out for every finding. Do it yourself, or forward it to whoever looks after your site.
• For a local business, the report says which of your address, opening hours and map location your pages don’t give in a form Google can read, and how to add them. This check runs only for sites we judge to be local businesses.
• An AI-Readiness score: whether your robots.txt lets in the readers behind AI answers, whether you publish an llms.txt, whether your pages give an assistant something to quote, and whether their code says who you are.
• What is already working, named rather than assumed.

It costs $0. Reading your audit goes through each section of the report and what it is telling you.

How Long It Takes

A 300-page site takes about five minutes, and one at the 500-page limit about ten. We ask for at most three pages a second, one at a time, and slow down if your site pushes back, so your site never feels us. The report arrives by email when it is ready.

If your site is larger than 500 pages, the report says so at the top. Everything in it is accurate for the pages we read; it just is not all of them.

Limits on the Free Audit

Free audits are limited per email address

Ask again for a site you have already audited and we email you the report you already have. A re-sent report does not use up an audit, and neither does one we could not finish or one that read no page because your server failed when we asked for robots.txt. For the audit every month, there are the paid plans, Essentials and Pro.

A reading up to 7 days old may be reused

If a free audit of the same site finished inside that window, your report is built from that reading rather than asking the site for every page again — and the report says the date it is from. An audit that read no page because the server failed when we asked for robots.txt is never reused, so the next one asks the site again.

At most three requests a second while reading

One at a time, and one a second if the site pushes back, so an audit is not something a server notices.

The Emails That Come With It

Ticking the box on the form asks for three things together: the report, a short series of follow-up emails about it, and SiteCandor’s newsletter with news and offers. Each early follow-up takes one finding from your report and explains it, and later ones say what a subscription adds and suggest a fresh audit.

The unsubscribe link in any of them stops all of them, and your report stays yours — which emails are which.

Your Report Link

The link in your email is good for seven days. When it expires, the page it lands on offers to send a fresh one to the same address — the report itself does not expire.

What the Paid Plans Add to the Free Audit

Both paid plans, Essentials and Pro, re-run the same checks on their own and tell you what changed. The free audit tells you where your site stands today; most sites do not stay put — pages get edited, software gets updated, somebody ships a change on a Friday, and Google moves the goalposts on its own.

Each runs the same checks, on up to 1,000 pages a site, read the same way, every month on its own, with a list of what changed since last time — alongside rankings checked every week, AI assistants asked about you every week, keyword research, and suggestions for the keywords worth tracking. Pro adds your key pages checked once a day and competitor page analyses, and covers more than one site.

If the Report Does Not Arrive