The 9 best SEO audit tools in 2025

If you're like most humans, the word "audit" gives you an instant twinge of anxiety. But if you're an SEO professional (and thus not like most humans), it might fill your head with grand visions of actionable marketing insights.

Digital marketers depend on tools that generate these insights, so we can learn what's bringing traffic to a website, why content is plummeting on the SERP, and how copy on a page can be improved.

I've used plenty of SEO audit tools in my career, and to help you pick the right one for your needs, I spent even more time testing the top options.

Ranging from free auditing apps to enterprise-level marketing suites, these products will help SEO pros at any level diagnose and improve site performance.

The best SEO audit tools

• SEOptimer for SMBs

• Morningscore for SEO beginners

• Screaming Frog for a free version of a premium product

• SE Ranking for value

• Semrush for an audit tool from a premium SEO suite

• Ahrefs for technical auditing

• Clearscope for on-page optimization

• Conductor Website Monitoring for real-time monitoring

• Google for free auditing

What makes the best SEO audit tool?

There's a healthy bit of hair-splitting that goes on with naming SEO tool categories. SEO audit software, SEO rank trackers, keyword research tools, and more general SEO tools have a lot of crossover because the companies that do one thing well tend to do other things well, too.

That's all to say my definition might be different from yours, but here's what I was looking for in the best SEO audit tools:

• Dedicated audit features: SEO auditing could be the product's main function, or it could be a separate dashboard within a more comprehensive suite.

• Multiple SEO-related metrics: The product should report on more than one metric applicable to SEO, like page speed, traffic, user behavior, and keyword saturation.

• Scoring with actionable SEO insights: Metrics should be presentable as an exportable report (say that five times fast) and include actionable SEO insights.

• Reputable: The software's provider should be widely respected in the industry, provide transparency about its scoring methodology, and/or rely on reputable data sources like Google Search Console.

• AI: AI is no longer a nice-to-have; it's a core part of an SEO audit tool. I looked for tools that incorporated AI to help identify data patterns and suggest optimizations the human eye might overlook. As search algorithms evolve, manual analysis just isn't enough to keep up.

I tested each of the apps on this list, and each one ticks all the boxes. I've also tested dozens of others and researched dozens more SEO tools, both for my own use and for the purposes of finding the best for this list. So I can attest that each one is a quality option that should more than meet your SEO auditing needs.

The best SEO audit tools at a glance

Best SEO audit tool for SMBs

SEOptimer (Web)

SEOptimer pros:

• Reasonably priced and feature-rich

• Over 60 independent tools for auditing, research, and generation

• White-label reporting and audit tool embedding

• A host of handy free tools for the marketer on a budget

SEOptimer cons:

• Lowest tier lacks some key features

• Lacks some of the tools you get from premium products

If your goal is to spend a lot of money on an SEO tool, there are plenty of premium options out there. But if you want a really dynamic SEO audit tool at budget pricing, SEOptimer is one of my favorites.

Like many of the premium tools, SEOptimer has the usual SEO fare, like keyword research, rank tracking, and reporting, but it's also got a nice collection of independent auditing tools like:

• Title tag checker

• Meta description checker

• SERP preview

• Website word count

• Noindex tag test

• Font size and legibility checker

Many of these are the sorts of insights you could get in a detailed SEO audit, but it's handy to have standalone modules for each one in case you just want a quick check on something like mobile responsiveness or core metrics.

Its quick audit tool gives a helpful general overview of metrics like on-page SEO, social media viability, and user-friendliness (looks like SEOptimer could use some of its own advice there). Below the score summary is a list of individual elements and recommendations for each metric, ranked by priority. 

If you want downloadable reports on your metrics, you'll have to upgrade to the (still reasonably priced) White Label tier, which also gives you access to white-label reporting in 15 languages. And with API access and an embeddable tool, SEOptimer gives even small agencies and solo consultants access to an inclusive tool they can deploy for their own clients. Is the depth of reporting and functionality quite as robust as premium tools like Ahrefs or Semrush? No. Is it surprisingly robust SMB software? Absolutely.

SEOptimer pricing: DIY SEO ($29/month), White Label ($39/month), White Label and Embedding ($59/month)

Best SEO audit tool for beginners

Morningscore (Web)

Morningscore pros:

• Clean, easy-to-navigate interface

• Gamified SEO tasking (you get "Mission XP" for setting up your dashboard)

• Smooth trial and onboarding 

Morningscore cons: 

• Slight learning curve if you're used to other SEO tools due to the unique scoring and dashboards

• Limited data sources (smaller database than Semrush and Ahrefs, only pulls from Google)

• Fewer integrations than some other tools

Morningscore calls you "Captain" right out of the gate—what more could you ask for? Morningscore has managed to make SEO fun—which is not a sentence I ever thought I'd write. The dashboards are set up to encourage you to build out your SEO program by rewarding you with XP for each task (which are called missions) and treating you, the user, as a starship captain bound to infinity and beyond… or at least the first page of Google. 

The second thing I noticed about Morningscore, after getting past the charming Star Trek-esque dashboard, is how easy it is to actually use. It's clearly designed with beginners in mind—which is great news if you're new to SEO or run a small business—but doesn't skimp on the actual functionality. It's got all the essentials for an SEO audit tool, like keyword tracking, backlink analysis, and site vitals. 

There are some limitations here. The basic plan limits how many keywords you can track, for example, so it might not be the best choice for larger websites. Morningscore also only integrates with Google, so you'll miss out on data from users who prefer other search engines like Bing, Yahoo, or DuckDuckGo.

Morningscore offers a basic AI-assisted writing helper and some AI-driven content research assistance (with link-building suggestions), but its AI leaves something to be desired right now. The good news is that it has released a 2025 AI roadmap that details specifically how this will change.

This might just be the former gamer in me talking, but Morningscore stands out with its creative approach and focus on user experience. It's not powered by as much data as some of the bigger players like Semrush or Ahrefs, but if you're looking for a simple, engaging way to learn SEO and improve your website, Morningscore is a great option.

Morningscore pricing: Lite: $49/month, Business: $69/month, Pro: $129/month, Premium: $259/month

Best free SEO audit tool from a premium product

Screaming Frog (macOS, Windows, Linux)

Screaming Frog pros:

• Crawls up to 500 URLs in the free plan

• Easily exports to spreadsheets

• Upgrade is reasonably priced

• Directly connects to OpenAI, Gemini, and Ollama APIs

Screaming Frog cons:

• Not very visually dynamic

• Runs on a desktop, not a browser

With its desktop-based SEO Spider tool, Screaming Frog has become a household name for SEO auditing—and its free version could be plenty for businesses and individuals on a tight marketing budget.

One of the key limitations of free trial tools is crawl budget. Websites with years of content, tons of product pages, or auto-generated pages could easily have thousands upon thousands of pages. That means the 500 URL crawl limit could indeed be pretty limiting, but that's actually pretty generous among free plans (Semrush's, for example, maxes out at 100). For smaller, newer sites, 500 should be plenty.

What you do get from free SEO Spider is the ability to analyze elements like broken links, metadata, hreflang attributes, and duplicate pages, plus sitemap generation. Structured like a spreadsheet, this lo-fi desktop software gives you an easily sortable overview of your website, so you can quickly find issues, review core vitals, and readily export findings to Excel or Google Sheets.

You can also connect Screaming Frog to your favorite AI chatbot (like ChatGPT or Gemini) to create custom prompts that do things like automatically generate descriptive and keyword-optimized alt text for thousands of images across your website. You don't have to use JavaScript to accomplish this anymore, either—with the AI integration, you just add Gemini or ChatGPT via the API Access tab on the desktop app and add a text prompt.

Screaming Frog isn't for everyone. If you like browser-based audit tools that are more interactive and play a little easier with live websites, it's probably not the vibe for you. But when it comes to reporting on essential SEO issues and metrics, this is one of the more generous free plans among the usual premium software options.

Screaming Frog pricing: Free, Paid ($259/year)

Best value SEO audit tool

SE Ranking (Web)

SE Ranking pros:

• Clean data visualizations

• Flexible audit grouping

• On-page SEO and backlink audits

SE Ranking cons:

• May hit crawl limits at lowest tier

SE Ranking has had a consistent presence on my SEO tool roundups because I'm always impressed by the bang they give you for your proverbial buck. Starting at less than half the price of premium SEO suites, it packs a veritable ton of features into its user-friendly interface, including a strong audit tool.

From the main dashboard, you can download PDF reports, connect to Looker Studio, send reports directly to partners, or generate a sitemap. If you're on the Agency plan, you can also use the AI Summaries feature within reports to get a quick text summary of your data. These audits have many of the same metrics you'll find in just about any tool on this list, but I like SE Ranking's clean data presentation, which has a few unique callouts. The core web vitals chart is especially useful, showing a detailed breakdown of your site by user experience ratings.

I also like the flexibility of SE Ranking's audit tool, which allows you to name individual audits, sort them into groups, hide resources, and set allowed/disallowed URLs. You can then compare audits in a dedicated comparison dashboard to see how site improvements are going over time. It even monitors page changes automatically, so you can get regular performance updates.

Beyond general SEO audits, SE Ranking includes AI-powered tools for auditing backlinks and on-page SEO performance. The on-page SEO audit shows a highly detailed breakdown of key technical and SEO elements on individual pages crawled by a bot and automatically suggests optimizations in a handy checklist widget so you can get low-performing pieces to rise in rankings. The AI Results Tracker sets its sights on conquering AI snippets by providing data on site position specifically in AI snippets, including historical data. This is a neat addition to the AIO insights in the Competitive Research and Keyword Research tools, where you can see which keywords get AI snippets.

It's worth noting that SE Ranking's pricing tiers scale by number of pages without an option for unlimited pages, so if you're auditing massive volumes of pages, you could hit your limit. But for pretty average usage, SE Ranking has the goods for a fraction of the cost of premium products.

SE Ranking pricing: Essential ($52/month), Pro ($95.20/month), Business ($207.20/month)

Best SEO audit tool from a premium SEO suite

Semrush (Web)

Semrush pros:

• Rich reporting

• Ability to compare audits and track issue resolutions

• Clean, highly responsive interface

• Arguably some of the best AI-powered SEO tools on the market

Semrush cons:

• May be cost-prohibitive

• Free version maxes at 100 URLs

With some of the smartest, smoothest SEO tools in the game, it's no surprise that Semrush makes this list in some capacity. And with its lowest tier priced higher than many products' premium tiers, it's positioned for users with spacious marketing budgets.

I've always liked Semrush's interface, and its clean, responsive design extends to its audit tool. The overview dashboard gives you a really clear picture of your website's hang-ups and uniquely charts them over time. As you dig into the issues, you can follow breadcrumbs to the individual links and even get detailed explanations of what the issue type means and how you can fix it. You can even re-crawl specific pages straight from the dashboard to see if you've fixed the issue.

As you peruse tabs on the audit, you can sort link charts by things like number of issues, crawl depth, page views, and status code. Hovering over a column header shows you a pop-out description to give you insights into the metrics—like ILR, or Internal LinkRank, which Semrush describes as a measurement of "link juice" (a phrase I've always found vaguely gross for reasons I can't explain).

One of the really helpful things about this audit tool is that it allows you to measure improvement. You can compare current and past audits, review an audit stat dashboard, and even track issue types and resolutions over time on a full-size line chart.

Semrush has also committed hard to integrating AI into all of its tools where humanly (robotically?) possible. Keyword Overview, the Keyword Magic Tool, and the Keyword Strategy Builder all incorporate an AI element that automates data analysis. The AI actually recommends the most effective keywords to target based on historical performance data and current competitive metrics—making manual analysis and/or guesswork a thing of the past. Additionally, Semrush Copilot provides targeted SEO advice directly in users' dashboards, so you can see all that great AI-powered analysis without traversing several clicks away.

If that's not enough to convince you, Semrush connects to Zapier, so you can do things like send Slack channel messages for completed audits. Here's a taste of what else Zapier can automate with Semrush.

Many of these features are available for the free version, but you'll have to pay up if you want full features or to go above the pretty confining 100 URL limit. If you're willing to pay up, in my book, Semrush's audit tool has the best combination of features, user experience, AI tools, and ease of use among premium SEO suites.

Semrush pricing: Free, Pro ($139.95/month), Guru ($249.95/month), Business ($499.95/month)

Best SEO audit tool for technical auditing

Ahrefs (Web)

Ahrefs pros:

• Lots of analysis categories

• Breaks down audit by site structure

• Multiple tools for recommending site improvements

• Powerful AI content grading tool

Ahrefs cons:

• User experience isn't quite as clean as some other premium tools

• May be cost-prohibitive

One of the go-to tool suites for SEO professionals, Ahrefs' site audit tool is powerful enough for marketers at every level to get highly actionable marketing insights.

Unlike less-than-premium audit tools, Ahrefs has a pretty extensive breakdown of its analysis. You can peruse a list of issues (expandable to view deeper insights), review the crawl log, explore individual pages or links, dive into indexability factors, or spelunk into the performance metrics (ran out of verbs at the end). You can even link directly with Google tools like PageSpeed Insights and Core Web Vitals to Google-fy your analyses.

One of the more unique audit features is the ability to explore the audit by structure. This interface shows you how metrics like HTTP status code, content type, traffic, and indexability stack up on structural levels based on your site's hierarchy. This can help you potentially diagnose those hard-to-find structural issues when you can't figure out why performance is down even though you're seemingly doing everything right.

Another highlight feature is the Internal Link Opportunities application, which recommends anchor text and target URLs for pages across your whole website. Since target suggestions are based on slugs, it's not always 100% accurate—theoretically, if you run a hybrid cybersecurity/shelf-stable cooking blog, it might suggest linking anchor text on how to block spam to a recipe page on cooking with a block of Spam. But it's still incredibly useful for optimizing internal linking.

And, of course, it wouldn't be 2025 without a slew of AI additions to every conceivable part of the platform. For Ahrefs, many of these updates center around content optimization rather than technical SEO. Recent improvements include:

• AI Content Helper optimizes articles by providing a score for your piece based on content, not keyword density.

• AI Content Grader uses AI to look at the topics covered in your copy and grades it based on the topic, not the number of times you use the word "banana" in a post about a monkey's favorite fruits. 

• AI Search Intent surfaces searches similar in intent to the one you're trying to rank for, even if there's no overlap in the words themselves. 

All these updates work toward the same goal: making your life easier by reducing the time you spend manually analyzing data.

Ahrefs isn't necessarily known for being the most impressive platform out there from a user experience standpoint, but the audit tool is definitely simple enough to get up and running. (Just note that the free audit tool will require website ownership verification, which can be a hassle.) I found it a little tougher to navigate than Semrush, but it's not that hard to get the hang of. Small downside for one of the best technical SEO tools out there.

Ahrefs pricing: Lite ($129/month), Standard ($249/month), Advanced ($499/month), Enterprise ($14,990/year)

Best SEO audit tool for on-page optimization

Clearscope (Web)

Clearscope pros:

• Detailed on-page SEO auditing

• Suggestions for keywords, questions, and citations

• Multiple keyword research and tracking tools

Clearscope cons:

• Fairly limited utility

• Premium price tag

Ok, this one's kind of a cheat. Unlike the rest of the tools on this list, which perform domain-level crawls to tell you what's going on with your website, Clearscope is strictly focused on the content of a single page.

Clearscope's primary purpose is to analyze the copy on a webpage and provide AI-assisted suggestions on improving its searchability. Loading up blog content like the AI-generated one in the image above, you can see metrics like how long the post should be, text readability, relevant keywords you can add to the copy, and keyword density. 

It even has a handy tab for pulling up research on the topic from around the web, showing you common questions about the target topic and webpages other posts are linking to. The outline tab is also really helpful, as it wrangles the heading structure for top-ranking posts and serves them up in a convenient list. You can also have Clearscope generate SEO-focused outlines with AI based on that web research—which gives your content a leg up from the start. This is the only major standalone AI feature added in the past year, but it's so helpful it's hard to argue with.

Beyond the on-page stuff, Clearscope also has tools for more general keyword research, position tracking, keyword discovery, and even keyword opportunities. I don't imagine there are many fuller-service SEO tools Clearscope can replace, but as a premium standalone tool, it's the gold standard for automatic on-page SEO auditing.

Clearscope pricing: Essentials ($189/month), Business ($399/month), Enterprise (custom)

Best SEO audit tool for real-time monitoring

Conductor Website Monitoring (Formerly ContentKing) (Web)

Conductor Website Monitoring pros:

• Real-time 24/7 auditing

• Highly responsive, user-friendly interface

• Proprietary Importance metric

Conductor Website Monitoring cons:

• Pricing model is unclear

• Doesn't have as many supplemental tools as comprehensive SEO suites

• Limited function without the rest of the Conductor tool suite

Conductor Website Monitoring (formerly ContentKing) is one of the more unique SEO auditing tools on the market. If its website is to be believed, it's the only tool of its kind with real-time audit updating, meaning your dashboard shows up-to-the-minute analysis every time you look at it.

ContentKing wasn't exactly a household name (at least not in the U.S.), and to be totally transparent, I'd never heard of it until I saw other SEO professionals mention it in Reddit forums (at which point I tried it out for myself). And sure, you could just re-crawl a website or webpage every time you want an update, but round-the-clock updating makes it a more complete data hub. While it was recently acquired by Conductor, the basic ContentKing functions remain part of Conductor's Website Monitoring app, which is one of several platforms available from Conductor.

Like many other audit tools, Conductor's site monitoring offering gives a detailed breakdown of site performance issues with colorful graphs, along with an overall health score (out of 1,000 for major granularity). I also like the proprietary metric Importance, which calculates a 1 to 10 score that gauges the value of a page to the site's performance using a secret recipe of metrics. This can help users prioritize pages to update. 

As a dedicated SEO audit tool, Conductor Website Monitoring does lack some of the deeper functionality of high-end comprehensive tools in the realms of idea generation, competitive analysis, and keyword tracking. It's really best suited as a pure auditing/performance monitoring dashboard. (It's also not being updated as regularly as other parts of the Conductor suite of tools.) But it does integrate with tools like Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, Looker Studio, and Slack, so you can really pump up the analytical jams. 

Overall, Conductor Website Monitoring has a really slick interface that's incredibly responsive. Hovering over issues updates the little health bar in the corner of the nav, showing how much the fix would improve site health (kind of like distributing EXP when you level up in an old-school RPG). I also like how every link, metric, or category is a clickable widget that comes with its own details, explanation, or interactive element. There's clearly a lot of intention built into the design, and it's working.

My biggest knock is that pricing on this one is kind of shady—it's scaled by plan and number of pages and isn't standardized like most products. Nor is there any transparency into the logic behind this. Zapier qualifies for Enterprise pricing, so I have no idea what this thing costs. (SaaSworthy reports plans start at $49 monthly for up to 1,000 pages, but I can't verify this.)

Conductor Website Monitoring pricing: Four pricing plans available: Basic, Standard, Pro, and Enterprise. What do those plans cost? …Nay, they shan't say.

The best free SEO audit tools

Google

The other audit tools on this list are great, but most of their function is to make it easier to use the data Google already provides for zero dollars. These are the main Google SEO tools you should know about if you want to get your data straight from the horse's mouth:

• Google Search Console: Webmaster tools for reporting on technical elements related to search performance

• Google Analytics: Provides real-time reports on key website performance metrics

• PageSpeed Insights: Analyzes website and webpage loading speeds and provides suggestions for improvement

• Looker Studio: A tool that pulls data for reporting and visualization

(Technically, I could have included any of these tools individually in this roundup since they meet all my criteria and offer the most accurate Google traffic data available. I just didn't want half the list to be Google products, so instead, I focused on the kinds of subscription-based tools I think most people are looking for—and now I'm telling you that you can start with Google for free.)

It's important to understand where your SEO data comes from—mostly Google—because it can help you understand why your site traffic fluctuates. Think of it as looking behind the curtain and catching a peek of the wizard at work. For example, Google released four major updates to how it ranks search results in 2024, resulting in a lot of lost traffic for some sites—which was then reflected in SEO audit tools. If you weren't auditing your search performance, you might have just been greatly alarmed by the drop in site traffic.

Google's free SEO tools may not have the most straightforward interfaces, but you can do your own string-and-a-tin-can SEO research using only these tools and get more or less the same results.

Make the most of your SEO audit tool

Whichever SEO tool you pick, remember that very few products out there are dedicated solely to auditing. Most are part of more general SEO suites, so it's worth considering your long-term SEO needs and whether your product of choice has other tools you'll need down the road.

It's also worth considering whether the software integrates with other apps you commonly use. If it doesn't, Zapier probably does, enabling you to build automated workflows across applications.

Related reading:

• How to use automation to keep an eye on the competition

• The best SEO content optimization tools

• A step-by-step guide to competitive market analysis

• Programmatic SEO: How to increase search traffic with no-code tools

This article was originally published in January 2024. The most recent update, with contributions from Abigail Sims, was in February 2025.