Free SEO Health Check

What the SEO health check looks at

The checks fall into three groups, and each one answers a question that decides whether a page can earn traffic at all.

Can search engines reach and index this page?

This is the group that matters most, because a page that cannot be crawled or indexed cannot rank no matter how good it is. The check looks at the HTTP status, whether robots.txt allows the page, whether a noindex directive is present, what the canonical tag says, and whether a sitemap exists and lists real URLs. It also checks that the www and non-www versions settle on one address, so your pages are not competing with copies of themselves.

A single stray noindex left over from a staging site is one of the most common reasons a new site gets no traffic. It is worth checking after every launch.

Does the page explain itself clearly?

Titles, meta descriptions and headings tell search engines, and increasingly AI search tools, what a page is for. The check measures title and description length, confirms there is exactly one H1, and reviews the heading structure beneath it. Pages with no H1, or five of them, usually have a layout problem that confuses both readers and crawlers.

Length matters for a practical reason: Google truncates by pixel width, so a long title loses its most useful words in the results. If you want to see exactly where the cut-off falls, use theSERP simulator.

Does it load properly, especially on a phone?

The check measures server response time, looks for a mobile viewport tag, and reviews images for alt text, modern formats such as WebP or AVIF, oversized files and lazy loading. Images are the most common cause of a slow page by a wide margin, and alt text is both an accessibility basic and a small ranking signal.

Security sits alongside this: HTTPS, redirects to HTTPS, mixed content and security headers. These do not win rankings on their own, but a browser warning on your site costs you customers.

How to read your results

You get a score out of 100 and three category scores for SEO, performance and security. The score is a summary, not a target. A page scoring 70 with a clean indexing setup is in better shape than one scoring 85 that is blocked from Google.

Work through the results in this order. Fails first, because those are usually blocking something: a noindex tag, a broken canonical, a missing H1, a page that will not load quickly. Warnings next, which are worth scheduling rather than panicking about. Passes you can ignore, though it is worth reading the detail, since a pass on title length tells you nothing about whether the title is any good.

Then repeat on a few more pages. Run your homepage, a service or category page, a product page and a blog post. Problems that appear on all four are template problems, and fixing a template fixes every page built from it.

What it cannot check

Being straight about the limits is more useful than overselling the tool. The health check reads one page, once, as the HTML is served. It cannot tell you:

• Whether your content is any good, or matches what searchers actually want.
• How you compare with the competitors you are actually up against.
• Which keywords each page should target, or where two pages compete for the same one.
• How your pages link to each other across the site.
• What your Search Console and analytics data say about pages that are slipping.
• Whether your structured data is valid and complete, which needs a site-wide look.
• Anything rendered only by JavaScript after the HTML is served.

That is the line between a free checker and a full SEO audit. An audit starts at £495 for a small website, covers the whole site rather than one page, and comes back with a prioritised plan: what to fix, in what order, and what it should do for you. The checker is the first ten minutes of that work, made free.

After the check

Fix the fails, then look at the things no tool measures. Does the page answer the question someone typed? Is the most useful sentence near the top? Would a stranger trust it? Those decide whether a page that can rank actually does.

Launching a new site? Work through the interactive launch QA checklist. Marking a page up properly? Use the schema generator. For how AI search reads pages, seeAI SEO.

Is this an AEO or AI SEO checker?

Partly, and it's worth being straight about which part. AI answers are built from pages that can be fetched, read and understood, so the checks here, indexability, titles, headings, clean HTML and speed, are the same groundwork that AI search depends on. If a page fails those, no amount of AI-specific tinkering will help.

What this tool does not do is track whether ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google's AI Overviews currently mention your business. That needs repeated prompting and monitoring, not a page check, and any tool claiming to do it from a single URL scan is guessing. If that is what you need, it is whatAI visibility tracks every month.