What a technical SEO audit covers, and the checklist to hold a supplier to
A prompt that turns a quote for an SEO audit into a checklist: what each item is, how you can tell it was really done, and what to ask when you cannot tell.
- Works in
- ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini
- You need
- The scope or quote you have been sent · One sentence on your site and what it runs on
- Written for
- what is seo audit
Scored by our own engine
This page, run through the audit we sell. Measured 4 August 2026.
An SEO audit is a systematic check of whether a website can be crawled, indexed, understood and read quickly, ending in specific changes and where each one has to be made. The prompt below turns the quote you were sent into a checklist, separating what the supplier actually offered from what a technical audit normally covers.
What a technical audit covers
The machine facing layer: crawler access, indexability, canonical URLs, structured data, server speed, and whether the content exists in the HTML before JavaScript runs. Roughly in that order, because each one decides whether the next matters.
Expanded, that means whether crawlers can reach the site at all, whether pages are allowed into the index, which URL is treated as the real one when several are similar, and what the page says about itself in its title, its headings and its markup.
Two of those are worth understanding as a buyer. Indexability is binary and unforgiving: one noindex directive left in a template removes pages from search entirely while every human visitor sees a page that works perfectly. And rendering has become its own item, because most AI crawlers do not run JavaScript, so a site can rank acceptably on Google and be close to invisible to assistants.
What is not an audit
Three things get sold as one. A keyword list is research, not an audit. A competitor report describes somebody else’s site. A folder of tool screenshots is an export, and the work you are paying for is precisely the part the tool did not do: deciding which of the two hundred defects matter, grouping them by the template that causes them, and saying what changes.
The test is simple. Ask what has to change and who changes it. A real finding names a template, a header, a plugin or a file. A finding that cannot be answered that way was copied from a checklist.
The question that separates them
Ask what the audit could not check, and why. Every honest audit has that list, because some checks need access you may not have granted and some need data nobody has.
A report without it has the most expensive property a report can have: an area nobody examined reads exactly like an area that was examined and found clean, and the same problem then survives three consecutive audits.
Before you sign anything, settle one finding yourself. The AI crawler checker reads your live robots.txt and names which assistants are blocked, which takes seconds and tells you whether the supplier is looking at the same file you are. If you want to see the shape of a finished audit before you commission one, the worked example runs one end to end on a single page, input and scored output both shown. For the wider version of the question, technical work being one part of it, what an SEO audit actually checks covers the full list.
I have been quoted for an SEO audit and I do not know what I am buying. Turn
the scope below into a checklist I can hold the supplier to. Write for
somebody who runs a business and does not work in SEO.
Rules you must follow:
1. Work from the scope I pasted. Split every checklist item into one of two
groups: IN THE QUOTE, where the scope says it is included, and NOT IN THE
QUOTE, where it does not. Do not assume something is included because it
is normal to include it.
2. For each item give exactly three things: what it is, in one sentence with
no jargon; the evidence that proves it was actually done, meaning a
specific artefact rather than a claim; and the question to ask if that
evidence is missing.
3. Mark every item that needs access I have to grant, and name the access:
Search Console, analytics, server logs, CMS login, staging. A supplier
who has not asked for these cannot have done those items, and I should be
able to spot that before the work starts.
4. Do not tell me whether the price is fair. You cannot see the market rate,
the supplier's costs or what else is in their proposal, and a made up
benchmark is worse than no opinion. Say nothing about price.
5. Do not recommend a specific vendor, agency or paid tool by name. Where a
tool category is genuinely needed, say what it has to be able to do.
6. You cannot crawl my site, you cannot see my Search Console and you cannot
see the supplier's report. So you cannot tell me whether any finding they
produce is true. Say this once, plainly, at the end, and tell me the one
thing I can verify myself.
7. Do not pad. If an item is genuinely optional for a site like mine, say
"optional for you, and why" instead of listing it as a requirement.
Output as a numbered checklist, grouped under IN THE QUOTE and NOT IN THE
QUOTE. Each item in this shape, no table:
n. Item name
What it is:
Proof it was done:
Ask if you cannot see that proof:
Access needed:
Then two short sections:
WHAT THIS IS NOT: three things sometimes sold as an audit that are not one,
with one line each on what they are instead.
BEFORE YOU SIGN: the three questions to send back, written so I can paste
them into an email.
Constraints:
- Every item must trace to a line in the scope, or sit under NOT IN THE
QUOTE. Do not invent scope the supplier did not offer.
- Do not estimate how long the work takes or how much traffic it produces.
- If the scope is too vague to sort into the two groups, say which lines are
vague and what wording would fix them.
What my site is and what it runs on: [ONE SENTENCE, INCLUDING THE PLATFORM]
What access I can grant: [WHAT YOU ARE WILLING TO HAND OVER]
The scope I was sent: [PASTE THE QUOTE OR PROPOSAL, WORD FOR WORD]What to change
Everything in square brackets is yours to replace. Nothing else needs editing.
[ONE SENTENCE, INCLUDING THE PLATFORM]- For example "we sell industrial fasteners, 4,000 products on Shopify, most orders come by phone". The platform changes which items are relevant, since a hosted store cannot have some of the problems a custom build can, and the last clause changes which findings are worth paying to fix.
[WHAT YOU ARE WILLING TO HAND OVER]- List what you can actually grant: Search Console, Google Analytics, server logs, CMS access, staging. Roughly a third of a genuine technical audit is impossible without some of these, so the honest answer here tells you in advance which checklist items cannot be delivered no matter who you hire.
[PASTE THE QUOTE OR PROPOSAL, WORD FOR WORD]- The scope exactly as written, including the vague lines. Do not tidy it up. Phrases like "full technical review" and "on-page optimisation" are exactly what rule 1 is written to catch, and rewriting them into something clearer removes the evidence that they were unclear.
How to run it
- 01Paste the scope without editing it
Copy the proposal word for word, including the parts you did not understand and the parts that sound like filler. The vague lines are the point of the exercise. If you paraphrase them into plainer language first, you have quietly answered the question you were trying to ask.
- 02Be honest about the access you will grant
Write down what you are genuinely prepared to hand over. Server logs and Search Console are the two that unlock the most, and plenty of businesses will not share either. Knowing that upfront tells you which items are undeliverable before you argue with anyone about whether they were delivered.
- 03Read the NOT IN THE QUOTE group first
That group is the actual output. It lists the things a technical audit normally covers that this particular quote does not mention, which is the gap you are trying to see. Some of it will be reasonable to leave out. The point is that you leave it out on purpose rather than discover it at the end.
- 04Send the three questions before you sign anything
The BEFORE YOU SIGN section is written to be pasted into an email. A supplier who answers all three specifically is the one you want. A supplier who answers with reassurance rather than artefacts has told you something useful for the price of one message.
- 05Check one finding yourself when the report lands
Pick a finding you can verify without any tooling and confirm it. Whether AI crawlers can reach your site is one anybody can settle in a few seconds with the AI crawler checker, which reads your live robots.txt and names the bots that are blocked. One verified finding tells you a lot about the other forty.
- 06Ask what changes, not what was found
Take the delivered report and ask which template, header or file each finding needs changed, and who is expected to make the change. An audit that ends at a list of problems has handed you the easy half. The item that cannot be answered this way is usually the one that was copied in from a checklist.
Questions people ask
What is an SEO audit?
A systematic check of whether a website can be crawled, indexed, understood and read quickly, ending in a list of specific changes and where each one has to be made. A technical audit covers the machine facing parts: crawler access, indexability, canonical URLs, structured data, page speed and rendering.
What should be in the deliverable?
A list of findings with the evidence behind each, the exact change required, where that change is made, and an explicit list of what could not be checked and why. That last part is the one to look for. Without it you cannot tell an area that passed from an area nobody opened.
How do I tell a real audit from a tool report with a logo on it?
A tool report lists defects. An audit says which of them matter for your business, groups them by the template or file that causes them, and names what to do first. If every finding is one row per URL and nothing is prioritised against what makes you money, you have been sent an export.
What access does a supplier actually need?
Search Console at minimum, ideally analytics, and server logs for anything about crawl behaviour. A supplier who never asks for any of these can still audit what is publicly visible, which is real work, and they cannot tell you anything about how search engines are treating your site in practice.
Can I audit my own site instead?
Partly, and it is worth doing before you buy anything. The publicly visible layer is checkable for free: we run 19 single purpose checkers for exactly this, and the full engine runs 36 checks on a page. What you are paying a supplier for is scale across thousands of URLs and the judgement about which findings are worth the engineering time.
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