What we measured about it: the checks everyone lists, ordered by the failures we actually measured in live audits this month.
Run on your market, a read shows: every one of these checks run on your site as served, plus your real search demand under every phrasing, which AI answers in your market are open, partial or closed (with the evidence), what your competitors run in the public ad archives, and your break-even numbers computed from your own economics.
Book the 20-minute callor read the measured pieces first →"Seo audit template" is searched about 170 times a month at difficulty 0, and "how to do a seo audit" adds 170 searches a month. Rather than another abstract list, here is the checklist ordered by the failures we actually measured in August 2026 audits of live commercial sites. measured
The checklist, by real failure
Weight: one audited homepage shipped 14.3 MB over 378 requests: check your two largest images first. Tag hygiene: one store loaded 6 tag loads: open DevTools, filter "gtag", count. Duplicate libraries: one homepage ran 2 copies of jQuery from two versions: search view-source for the library name. Structured data: one product page shipped JSON-LD that failed to parse over a single unquoted leading-zero barcode, making the whole block invisible to search engines: paste your source into a JSON validator. Metadata: we audited a positioning-led site whose every description read as builder boilerplate: read your own tags aloud. Sitemap: one site's sitemap listed exactly one URL while its best page sat unlisted: fetch /sitemap.xml and count.
The check most lists skip
Whether the AI answers on your buyers' questions cite you, or ever could. It is the newest surface, it is measurable, and no template mentions it.
One read: your demand, your winnable AI answers, every competitor's ads, and your site's catch rate. Price and scope on a short call, plainly.
Book a call or see what a read contains →