How to use the Semrush Site Audit: a beginner's guide

The Semrush Site Audit crawls your website like a search engine bot, runs more than 140 technical and on-page SEO checks and reports the problems it finds. You get a Site Health score, a list of errors, warnings and notices, and explanations of how to fix each one. It is a quick way to find broken links, redirect problems, missing tags, crawl blocks and slow pages before they cost you traffic.

This guide walks through setup, the main reports and how to decide what to fix first.

What does the Semrush Site Audit check?

Semrush says the audit runs over 140 checks. They cover issues such as:

• Crawlability: pages search engines cannot reach, broken links, redirect chains and robots.txt blocks.
• On-page basics: missing or duplicate title tags, meta descriptions and H1s, and duplicate content.
• HTTPS: certificate and mixed-content problems.
• International SEO: hreflang errors on multilingual sites.
• Performance: slow pages and large files.
• Internal linking: orphaned pages and weak link structure. See internal linking.
• AI search: a newer category that checks how ready your site is for AI search engines.

How do you set up a Semrush Site Audit?

1. Create a project. When you create your first project, Semrush automatically starts a Site Audit for that domain. For later projects, open Site Audit and set it up yourself.
2. Set the scope. Enter a domain, subdomain or subfolder, and choose whether to crawl all subdomains.
3. Set the limit per audit. The maximum number of pages depends on your plan. Without the SEO Toolkit you can crawl up to 100 pages per month.
4. Choose the crawl source. Options are your website (the crawler follows links from the homepage), the sitemap listed in robots.txt, a sitemap by URL, or a list of URLs from a file.
5. Pick crawler settings. The user agent can be SiteAuditBot Mobile (the default), SiteAuditBot Desktop or OpenAI-Search. Choose a crawl delay; use a slower setting if your server struggles. JavaScript rendering is optional and depends on your plan.
6. Include or exclude sections. Allow or disallow subfolders, and list URL parameters to ignore so the crawler does not audit duplicates.
7. Handle restrictions. For staging or protected sites, Semrush offers a verification file, login credentials or a bot signature so it can crawl.
8. Schedule it. Run the audit once, daily or weekly. Then click Start Audit.

How do you read the Site Audit overview?

Site Health score

Site Health is a percentage from 0% to 100%. It reflects the number of errors and warnings found relative to the number of checks performed. Errors weigh more heavily than warnings. It is Semrush's own score, not a Google metric, so use it to track your progress.

Crawled pages

The overview splits crawled pages into healthy pages, broken pages, pages with issues, redirects and pages blocked from the crawler. A sudden rise in broken or blocked pages after a release is a red flag.

Errors, warnings and notices

• Errors are the most severe issues. Fix these first.
• Warnings are medium-severity issues.
• Notices are lower priority but can cause problems later.

Each issue in the Issues tab shows how many pages are affected and has a "Why and how to fix it" explanation.

Top issues

Top Issues ranks problems by how often they appear and their priority. It is the fastest list of quick wins.

Thematic reports

The overview links to focused reports on robots.txt, crawlability, HTTPS, international SEO, performance and internal linking. Use them when you want to work through one area at a time.

AI search widgets

Two newer widgets cover AI search. AI Search Health is a score for how well your site is optimised for AI search. Blocked from AI Search lists pages that your robots.txt blocks from AI user agents. Check that these blocks are deliberate.

What should you fix first?

1. Errors on important pages. Connect Google Analytics so you can see which high-traffic pages have issues, and start there.
2. Anything that blocks crawling or indexing. Robots.txt mistakes, accidental noindex tags and broken redirects can remove pages from search.
3. Broken links and redirect chains. They send crawlers and visitors to dead ends or detours.
4. Duplicate and missing tags. Unique titles and descriptions help search engines and searchers understand each page.
5. Performance issues. Slow pages hurt user experience. Read about Core Web Vitals.
6. Warnings and notices once the critical issues are fixed.

How do you track progress?

After you fix issues, rerun the audit. The Progress report shows how your Site Health score changes over time, and Compare Crawls shows which issues were fixed and which are new. Scheduled weekly audits catch problems introduced by new content or releases.

Be patient with results. Google says some changes take effect in a few hours and others take several months, and recommends waiting a few weeks before judging whether a change helped. Google also says there are no secrets that will automatically rank a site first.

How does the On Page SEO Checker fit in?

Site Audit finds technical problems. The On Page SEO Checker suggests how to improve individual pages for target keywords. Its ideas are based on the top 10 ranking competitors for each keyword and fall into seven groups: strategy, SERP features, content, semantics, backlinks, technical SEO and user experience. Usage is limited by the number of keyword analyses per month on your plan.

Use Site Audit to keep the site healthy, and On Page SEO Checker to improve the pages that matter most.

How much does Semrush Site Audit cost?

Without the SEO Toolkit you can audit up to 100 pages per month. Site Audit is part of every paid SEO + AI Search plan, starting with the SEO plan, and the Starter plan and higher include an AI-ready Site Audit. See our Semrush pricing guide for current prices.

Other crawlers, such as Screaming Frog SEO Spider and Sitebulb, focus only on technical audits. For a tool-independent checklist, read how to perform a technical SEO audit.