What Site Audit Checks# Link to this article
The audit catalog is a fixed set of issue types grouped into eleven categories, from crawlability and indexability through to structured data, security and international.
Site Audit reports against a stable catalog of issue types. The catalog is deliberately separate from the crawler's internal probe registry: one crawler check can evolve without rewriting issue history or breaking public issue URLs.
The categories# Link to this section
- Crawlability — response & discovery: status codes, redirect loops and chains, robots.txt, sitemaps, crawl depth.
- Indexability — directives & canonicals: noindex, canonical correctness, hreflang targets, orphaned pages.
- On-page — metadata & document structure: titles, meta descriptions, heading hierarchy, lang, viewport, Open Graph.
- Content quality — thin and duplicate content, boilerplate dominance, author and freshness evidence.
- Links — internal & external: broken links, anchor text, inlink counts, hreflang return links.
- Images — images & media: alt text, dimensions, legacy formats, lazy loading.
- Performance — Core Web Vitals: LCP, CLS, render-blocking resources, transfer size, caching.
- Structured data — JSON-LD validity and required schema properties.
- Security — mixed content, TLS certificate validity and expiry, security headers, cookie flags.
- Geo — international and regional targeting.
- Integrations — issues whose evidence comes from a connected source such as Search Console.
Checks that need more than a crawl# Link to this section
Some checks have requirements beyond fetching the page — a rendering pass, a Lighthouse run, field data, a TLS probe, a sitemap, or a connected Search Console or GA4 account. When a requirement is not met, the check reports as not run. It never reports as passed.
Severity# Link to this section
Every issue type carries a severity — critical, warning, notice or info — and issues are ordered so that the things most likely to cost you traffic surface first.
Written by Rankato