Type "google seo audit" or "google seo audit tool" and you will find those searches come back regularly. Behind them is almost always the same expectation: somebody wants to know what Google thinks of their site, as a number, with a list of things to fix.
That tool does not exist. Google publishes four others, all free, that each cover a slice of the job. Knowing which one answers which question saves a great deal of time, and above all stops you believing a site is healthy because a dial reads 98.
The four tools, and what each measures
| Tool | Answers | Says nothing about |
|---|---|---|
| Search Console | What Google has seen, crawled and indexed of YOUR pages | Copy quality, competitors |
| PageSpeed Insights | How fast a page displays | Content, indexing |
| Lighthouse | Performance, accessibility and best practice on a page | The site as a whole |
| Rich Results Test | Whether your structured data is valid | Whether it is useful to your business |
None of the four crawls a whole site to list its problems. Three of them examine one page at a time, and the fourth only reports on what Google has already encountered.
Search Console: the only one that talks about your pages
This is the first tool to set up, and the only one that requires proving the site is yours. That constraint is also what makes it valuable: it shows you information Google publishes nowhere else.
Three reports deserve a regular visit:
- Page indexing. How many of your pages are in the index, and for those that are not, the exact reason. This is where the question why my site does not appear on Google gets settled.
- Performance. The queries your pages appeared on, their average position and the number of clicks. It is the only source that tells you what people actually typed.
- Page experience. Speed measurements collected from real visitors, when traffic is high enough to gather them.
Search Console does not tell you what is wrong with your site. It tells you what Google made of it. That is not the same thing, and it is often more instructive.
Its blind spot is clear: it never judges a piece of writing. A page that is indexed, fast and free of technical errors can stay invisible simply because it answers nobody's question.
PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse: speed, not search
These two are the same thing seen from two places. Lighthouse is the analysis engine, built into the Chrome browser. PageSpeed Insights is the online service that runs it for you, and it adds, when they exist, the measurements collected from real visitors.
This is where the most widespread misunderstanding starts. The score out of 100 at the top of the page measures the technical performance of one page, not its relevance. A perfectly scored brochure site that never names its trade or its town will stay behind a slower but more specific competitor.
Speed counts, but as a tiebreaker between equally relevant pages, not as a ranking on its own.
The Rich Results Test
The fourth tool checks the validity of your structured data. That markup makes a star rating, a price, opening hours or a list of questions appear under your result.
It answers yes or no. It does not say whether the markup you added is the right one for your business, or whether it is worth the trouble. A local shop gains a lot from marking up its address and opening hours; a consultancy often has nothing to declare there.
What no Google tool will tell you
This is where the real limit sits, and the reason an audit remains a job in its own right.
- Whether your copy answers the question asked. No tool reads a page to judge whether it deserves to be read.
- What your competitors are doing. Google will never show you why another business ranks above you.
- Where to start. A list of twenty technical warnings with no order of priority wastes more time than it saves.
- Whether your domain name and URL structure hold up. Those decisions are taken beforehand and are hard to undo. See choosing a domain name.
Where to start in practice
If you are starting from nothing, this order avoids fixing details before causes.
- Set up Search Console and give it a few days to fill up.
- Read the indexing report: a page missing from the index has no reason to be optimised.
- Run your three most important pages through PageSpeed Insights, not all twenty.
- Rewrite the copy on those three pages before touching anything technical.
Each step is detailed in how to run an SEO audit of your site.
If you would rather begin with an overall picture, our free SEO audit crawls your pages and returns a list of fixes ranked by importance, with no account to create. It does not replace Search Console, which remains the only one speaking for Google: it answers the question Search Console leaves open, which is where to start.
Frequently asked questions
Does Google offer a free SEO audit tool?
Not in that form. Google publishes four free tools, each handling part of the question. Search Console for indexing, PageSpeed Insights for speed, Lighthouse for analysing a page, and the Rich Results Test for structured data. None produces an overall score or a ranked list of fixes.
Is Search Console enough to audit a site?
It is essential and insufficient. It reports what Google has seen, crawled and kept of your pages, which no other tool knows. It does not judge the quality of your copy, look at your competitors, or tell you where to start.
What is the difference between PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse?
Lighthouse is the analysis engine; PageSpeed Insights is the service that runs it and adds the real measurements collected from Chrome visitors. On a recent or quiet site those real measurements are missing, and only the lab test remains.
Does a score of 100 guarantee first place on Google?
No, and this is the most expensive misunderstanding of the lot. Those scores measure the technical performance of a page, not its relevance to a search. A perfectly scored page that answers nobody's question will stay behind an average one that does.
