A website audit is five different audits wearing one name. Technical SEO, page speed, accessibility, security and content quality are separate disciplines with separate tools, and no product on this list does all five well.
That is the thing most comparisons miss. People buy one tool, get a green score, and ship a site that is fast and crawlable and completely unusable with a screen reader. This list is organised by the five types so you can see what your current tool is not checking. If you want the checks themselves rather than a product, our site audit checklist sets them out, and how to do an SEO audit covers running one end to end.
How we checked this list
All fourteen were loaded on their live sites in August 2026 and screenshotted, so every tool here resolved and is real.
Prices are quoted only where the vendor publishes them on a page that loaded for us.
The five audit types
| Type | What breaks if you skip it | Tools |
|---|---|---|
| Technical SEO | Pages do not get indexed or ranked | Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, Semrush, Lumar |
| Speed and Core Web Vitals | Rankings and conversion both drop | PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, Dareboost |
| Accessibility | Real users excluded, legal exposure in some markets | WAVE |
| Security and hygiene | Trust, and occasionally everything | Built into several suites |
| Content quality | Traffic decays quietly over years | Semrush, Search Console |
Most "website audit tools" cover one and a half of these. Two of the five are free to check properly.
Quick answer
- Best free technical crawler: Screaming Frog
- Best explained technical audit: Sitebulb
- Best speed audit: PageSpeed Insights, free
- Best accessibility check: WAVE, free
- Best all-in-one paid: Semrush
- Best for very large sites: Lumar
- Best free overall starting point: Google Search Console
- Best branded client reports: SEOptimer
Comparison
| Tool | Primary type | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Google Search Console | Technical and content | Free |
| PageSpeed Insights | Speed | Free |
| WAVE | Accessibility | Free |
| Screaming Frog | Technical | Free to 500 URLs |
| Sitebulb | Technical | From $18/mo |
| Semrush | Technical and content | From $139/mo |
| Ahrefs | Technical and links | From $129/mo |
| SE Ranking | Technical, agency | On site |
| GTmetrix | Speed | Free tier |
| Dareboost | Speed and quality | Free test |
| Seobility | Technical | Free to 1,000 pages |
| WooRank | Technical, reporting | Trial |
| SEOptimer | Technical, branded reports | Trial |
| Lumar | Enterprise technical | On request |
Start with the three free ones
1. Google Search Console
Search Console reports what Google itself found on your site: indexing failures, Core Web Vitals in the field, mobile usability, structured data errors and manual actions. Setting the property up correctly matters here, and our explainer on URL prefix properties covers the choice.
No paid tool can tell you whether Google indexed a page. This one can, and it is the only source that is not an estimate.
Covers: technical and content. Misses: accessibility, security, anything Google does not care about.
2. PageSpeed Insights
Google's own speed audit, running Lighthouse and reporting both lab data and real-world Core Web Vitals from actual Chrome users where enough data exists.
The field data is the part that matters, because your site being fast on a developer's machine is not the measurement Google uses.
Covers: speed, plus basic accessibility and best practices. Misses: crawling, indexing, content.
3. WAVE
WAVE checks accessibility: contrast, alt text, heading structure, form labels, ARIA problems. It is free, it runs in the browser, and almost nobody in SEO uses it.
Accessibility overlaps heavily with SEO, because a page structured for a screen reader is a page structured for a crawler. It is also a legal requirement in a growing number of markets.
Covers: accessibility. Misses: everything else.
Then the technical crawlers
4. Screaming Frog SEO Spider
The industry standard. It crawls like a bot and reports broken links, redirect chains, duplicate titles, missing tags, orphan pages and more, free up to 500 URLs.
It now supports crawling with OpenAI and Gemini models attached, which is a genuinely new capability rather than a rebadged one.
Honest limit: it hands you a spreadsheet and assumes you know what matters. Past 500 URLs you need the licence.
5. Sitebulb
Sitebulb crawls the same ground and then prioritises the findings and explains why each one matters, which is the difference between a list of issues and an action plan.
The visualisations also make site architecture problems arguable with a client in a way a spreadsheet does not.
What it costs: from $18 per month for Desktop Lite, $42 for the full desktop tier, $125 for cloud.
6. Semrush Site Audit
Semrush runs over a hundred technical checks with issues sorted by severity, plus the content audit side that finds decaying and cannibalising pages.
The content half is what makes it worth the price over a pure crawler, because content decay is invisible to every tool above.
What it costs: from $139 per month.
7. Ahrefs Site Audit
Ahrefs' audit is solid and its real advantage is sitting next to the best link index available, so technical findings and link data are in one place. For the authority score on its own, our domain authority checkers list covers the free options.
What it costs: from $129 per month, with seats on top.
8. SE Ranking
A full audit with white label reporting for agencies at a lower price than the big two, plus rank tracking and keyword research in the same subscription.
Honest limit: less depth than Semrush on very large sites.
9. Lumar
Lumar, formerly DeepCrawl, handles enterprise scale: hundreds of thousands of URLs, scheduled crawls, and integration into development pipelines so problems are caught before deployment.
Honest limit: enterprise pricing on request, and comprehensively overkill below about 50,000 pages.
Then speed, in more depth
10. GTmetrix
GTmetrix gives a detailed waterfall of exactly what loads when, which is what you need to actually fix a slow page rather than just score it.
Testing from different locations and connection speeds is available on paid tiers.
Honest limit: lab data by default. Cross-check against field data in Search Console.
11. Dareboost
Dareboost runs speed and quality analysis with a free test, covering performance alongside broader quality checks in one report.
Honest limit: a smaller product than the others here, and the free test is limited.
Then the all-in-one report tools
12. Seobility
A full site audit with a generous free tier covering up to 1,000 pages, plus rank tracking and backlink checking on paid plans.
Honest limit: less prioritisation and explanation than Sitebulb.
13. WooRank
WooRank produces readable audit reviews aimed at non-technical stakeholders, which makes it useful for the conversation rather than the fix.
Honest limit: broad rather than deep. It is a report, not a crawl.
14. SEOptimer
Affordable audits with white label branded reports and an embeddable audit form you can put on your own site to capture leads.
For agencies, the lead capture side is often worth more than the audit itself. Our white label SEO audit tool list covers that use case properly.
Honest limit: broad, shallow. Good for a first conversation, not for the technical work after it.
A complete audit stack that costs nothing
Search Console for indexing and field Core Web Vitals. PageSpeed Insights for speed. WAVE for accessibility. Screaming Frog's free tier for crawling up to 500 URLs.
That covers four of the five types on a small site for zero. The fifth, content quality, needs either a paid tool or your own Search Console data read carefully, and our SEO audit tool comparison goes deeper on the SEO-specific end of this list. Our SEO audit checklist sets out the 42 checks to run across them.
What an audit does not do
Every tool here produces a list of problems. None of them fix anything, and the gap between the audit and the fix is where almost all of this value is lost. Our five-step AI SEO audit covers how to shorten that gap.
We look at a lot of sites where the same audit findings appear year after year, unresolved, in successively prettier reports. Before buying a fourteenth tool, it is worth checking whether you acted on the last one.
If the unfixed items are mostly content, thin pages, missing coverage, no internal links, that half can be run as software rather than as a backlog. Distribb produces and publishes the content and handles internal linking on a schedule, with a 3-day free trial. It audits nothing, so it sits alongside a tool from this list rather than replacing one. Schema is another item that can be generated rather than ticked off, which we cover in our guide to automated schema markup generation.