The best free SEO audit tools
Three genuinely free tools cover most of what a small site needs, and two of them are made by Google. If you are looking for a free SEO audit, start here and stop reading when you have enough — this page is on the site of a tool that costs $199, and most readers should not buy it.
Google Lighthouse — free, open source, already installed
Lighthouse is "an open-source, automated tool" you can run from Chrome DevTools, the command line, a Node module or a web UI. If you use Chrome, you already have it: open DevTools, pick Lighthouse, run it.
What it is genuinely good at: performance on a single page, measured properly. It is also what powers PageSpeed Insights, which "uses Lighthouse to analyze the given URL in a simulated environment" for its lab data. For "why is this page slow", nothing free is better.
What it does not do, in its own words: its SEO category declares ten scored audits and describes itself as "basic search engine optimization advice", noting that there are more checks it does not perform. It is also per page — it has no concept of your site as a whole, so orphan pages, canonical conflicts across templates and hreflang reciprocity are all invisible to it by design.
Google Search Console — free, and the only source of real Google data
Nothing else tells you what Google actually did with your site: which queries brought impressions, which pages were indexed and which were not. It is free, and for anything about your standing in Google specifically it is the primary source.
The limits are published and worth knowing before you rely on it. Reports show "a maximum of 1,000 rows, so some rows might be omitted". Data is not live — "normally, however, collected data should be available in 2-3 days". Google "might not track some queries that are made a very small number of times", so the long tail is partly absent. The URL Inspection API is capped at "2000 QPD" and "600 QPM" per property, which means a site of any size cannot be inspected page by page even by script.
Its Core Web Vitals report is field data: "the data for the Core Web Vitals report comes from the CrUX report", gathered from real visitors. That is more truthful than any simulation — and it needs enough traffic to exist. How much is not published: "An exact number is not provided."
And it only works on sites you own. You verify the property first, which makes it useless for looking at a competitor, or at a site you are about to take on as a client.
Screaming Frog, free tier — a real crawler, capped
The free tier is limited to 500 URLs. For a small brochure site that is the whole site, and you get an actual crawl rather than a page-at-a-time check: redirect chains, broken links, duplicate titles across pages.
It is the right free answer for anyone comfortable reading crawl data and deciding what matters. If a spreadsheet of every URL and its status codes is a useful artefact to you rather than a wall of numbers, take this one.
So when is anything paid worth it?
When the free ones have stopped answering your question, which happens in three specific places:
- More than 500 URLs, where the free crawl tier stops.
- Whole-site relationships — a canonical pointing at a noindex page, an hreflang set that is not reciprocated, a page nothing links to. None of these exist on any single page, so no per-page tool can see them.
- Being told what to do first. Every tool above hands you findings. Ordering them by what they cost you is the part that takes an expert, and it is the part a free tool does not attempt.
Docket is $199 paid once, runs on your Mac, and answers that third one: a ranked plan rather than a list. It is not free, and if your site is under 500 URLs and you are comfortable reading Lighthouse and Search Console, you do not need it. That is a real answer, not modesty — buying a tool to tell you what three free ones already told you is a waste of $199.
Download Docket · see how it compares, tool by tool
Checked 10 August 2026. The factual claims about this product were read from its own pages on that date: the SEO category declares ten scored audits — is-crawlable, document-title, meta-description, http-status-code, link-text, crawlable-anchors, robots-txt, image-alt, hreflang and canonical — plus one manual entry, structured-data, carrying a weight of zero; is-crawlable is weighted so that failing it alone fails the category (source); the category describes itself as "basic search engine optimization advice", adding that "there are many additional factors Lighthouse does not score here that may affect your search ranking" (source); it is "an open-source, automated tool" run from Chrome DevTools, the command line, a Node module or PageSpeed Insights; you give it a URL to audit, and the categories are performance, accessibility, best practices and SEO (source); PageSpeed Insights "uses Lighthouse to analyze the given URL in a simulated environment" for its lab data, while its field data is "powered by the Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) dataset" (source); the data behind Search Console's Core Web Vitals report "comes from the CrUX report", which gathers metrics "from actual users visiting your URL (called field data)" (source). Products change and pricing changes; if something here has gone out of date, tell us and it will be corrected. Everything else on this page is a comparison of approach, not a claim about their roadmap.
Checked 10 August 2026. The factual claims about this product were read from its own pages on that date: the URL Inspection API quota is "2000 QPD" and "600 QPM" per site (source); "Our tables can show a maximum of 1,000 rows, so some rows might be omitted" (source); "Normally, however, collected data should be available in 2-3 days" (source); Google "might not track some queries that are made a very small number of times", and most reports "only cover a representative sample" of a site's URLs (source); "The data for the Core Web Vitals report comes from the CrUX report" — field data from real visitors, reported at the 75th percentile — and "A URL group without threshold data for both LCP and CLS will not be on the report" (source); how much traffic a page needs before CrUX will report on it is not published: "An exact number is not disclosed" (source). Products change and pricing changes; if something here has gone out of date, tell us and it will be corrected. Everything else on this page is a comparison of approach, not a claim about their roadmap.
Checked 10 August 2026. The factual claims about this product were read from its own pages on that date: renders with the "integrated Chromium WRS" (source); free tier limited to 500 URLs; paid crawl limit "Unlimited", with the maximum "dependent on allocated memory and storage" (source). Products change and pricing changes; if something here has gone out of date, tell us and it will be corrected. Everything else on this page is a comparison of approach, not a claim about their roadmap.
Common questions
What is the best free SEO audit tool?
For a single page, Lighthouse — it is open source, built into Chrome DevTools, and powers PageSpeed Insights. For how Google actually treats your site, Search Console. For crawling a small site, Screaming Frog's free tier, capped at 500 URLs.
Is Google Lighthouse enough for SEO?
For one page at a time, often. Its SEO category describes itself as “basic search engine optimization advice” and notes there are checks it does not perform, and it has no view of your site as a whole — so canonical conflicts, hreflang reciprocity and orphan pages are invisible to it.
Why can't Search Console tell me everything?
Its limits are published: reports show at most 1,000 rows, data lags by about two to three days, very rare queries may not be tracked, and it only works on properties you have verified — so it cannot look at a competitor's site.
When is a paid SEO audit tool worth it?
When a site is bigger than the free crawl tier, when the problems are relationships between pages rather than faults on one page, or when you need the findings ordered rather than listed. Below that, the free tools are enough.