Docs · Updated 2026-09-11
Checks and limits
Exactly what Site Audit looks at on a page, how findings are ranked, how the score is worked out — and what it does not check, so nobody reads more into a report than it says.
Current check set: site-audit/2026-09-11. Saved audits record the version they ran with; comparing runs from different versions shows a notice, because a difference can come from a changed check rather than the page.
What audit_page checks
One URL per call, from the HTML the server returns (no JavaScript is run).
| Group | Checks | Severity when failing |
|---|---|---|
| Response | HTTP status (4xx/5xx is high), redirect chains (more than one hop), response time over 3 s, HTML over 2 MB, wrong Content-Type | High / Low / Medium |
| Indexing | noindex in meta robots or X-Robots-Tag; canonical missing, relative, pointing elsewhere, or several conflicting | High / Medium |
| Title | Missing (high), under 15 or over 65 characters, more than one <title> | High / Medium |
| Meta description | Missing (medium), over 170 characters (low), more than one | Medium / Low |
| Language and mobile | <html lang> missing; viewport meta tag missing | Medium |
| Headings and content | No <h1> or several; skipped heading levels; images without alt; under 150 words of text in the served HTML | Medium / Low |
| Social previews | Open Graph tags missing (og:image missing is medium), relative og:image, no twitter:card | Medium / Low |
| Structured data | JSON-LD that doesn't parse (high), missing @context, required properties for common types (Organization, Product, Article, FAQPage, Event…) | High / Medium / Low |
| International | hreflang without a self-reference, invalid language codes, no x-default | Medium / Low |
| Security | Not served over HTTPS (high); missing HSTS, X-Content-Type-Options, CSP, Referrer-Policy (low, hygiene only) | High / Low |
Three more tools go deeper on one topic: check_links (status of the page's links), check_crawl_rules (robots.txt and sitemaps for this URL) and check_social_preview (the preview image itself: status, type, size, dimensions).
Severity rule
- High — blocks indexing, sharing or the page itself.
- Medium — likely reduces visibility, click-through or preview quality.
- Low — best practice or hygiene; fix when convenient.
Every failed finding shows the evidence we observed, why it matters and a fix. Checks that could not run are listed as not checked with the reason — never as passed.
The heuristic score
A completed audit gets a number out of 100: 100 − 12 per high − 5 per medium − 1 per low, never below 0. Passed and not-checked items don't change it. It is a quick way to see whether a page got better or worse between two runs of the same page. It is not a ranking prediction, not comparable across different sites, and not given at all when the page was blocked, returned an error or wasn't HTML.
When the real page can't be seen
- Blocked — 401, 403, 429 or a bot-challenge page. We report the block, not the challenge page's content.
- Page error — 404, 410 or 5xx. Only the response is checked.
- Not HTML — PDFs, images, JSON. Page checks don't apply.
- No response at all (DNS, TLS, timeout) or a refused URL is an error, and isn't counted against your quota.
What Site Audit does not check
- Content rendered by JavaScript.
- Core Web Vitals and real-user speed.
- Rankings, traffic or keywords.
- Whether Google has actually indexed the page.
- Other pages on the site (no crawling).
- Whether content is accurate, original or well written.
- Accessibility beyond alt text, language and heading order — it is not an accessibility audit.
Fetch limits and safety
- HTML read up to 2 MB, preview images up to 6 MB, robots.txt and sitemaps capped separately. Requests time out after 7–10 seconds; at most five redirects.
- Only public
http/httpsURLs on default ports. No credentials in URLs, no private, loopback, link-local, metadata or reserved addresses (IPv4 and IPv6) — checked on every redirect and at connection time, so DNS tricks don't get through. - We send no cookies or authorization headers to the sites we audit. Text quoted from a page is treated as untrusted data, shortened and cleaned before it reaches your assistant.
Quotas and history
| Plan | Tool calls / month | Links per check | Calls / minute |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | 50 | 25 | 10 |
| Pro | 2000 | 100 | 30 |
Pro is not on sale yet; its price is a test price. Saved audits are kept 180 days, are visible only to your account, and can be switched off or deleted. See the usage policy for what counts as a call.