The 1776 Offer $250. 250 spots. Claim yours →

All AI prompts

The Website Audit Checklist (And the AI Prompts That Run It For You)

Most audit checklists are 200 items long and sorted by category, which means you spend an hour on image alt text before you notice the page is blocked from Google entirely. This one is sorted by what breaks revenue first.

By Ryan Goering, CEO & Founder, BaaDigi

Last updated August 2026

The Short Answer

A website audit checklist should run in order of impact, not category. Check these twelve things in sequence: (1) is the site indexed by Google, (2) does every important page return a 200 status, (3) does the homepage load in under 2.5 seconds on mobile, (4) does each page target one clear search phrase, (5) is there a phone number and form above the fold, (6) does the business name, address and phone match your Google Business Profile exactly, (7) are titles and meta descriptions unique per page, (8) is there structured data for the business type, (9) do internal links connect every page to at least two others, (10) do AI assistants like ChatGPT mention your business, (11) can automated agents read the site without JavaScript, and (12) is analytics actually recording conversions. Items 1 through 3 account for most real revenue loss; everything after that is optimisation.

Quick Answers

How long should a website audit take?

A focused audit of a small business site takes two to four hours. The first thirty minutes — indexing, status codes, and mobile load time — surface most of the problems that cost money. Full technical audits that take a week are usually documenting issues nobody will fix.

What is the single most common problem found in a website audit?

Pages that exist but are not indexed. A page Google has never crawled cannot rank for anything, no matter how well it is written. This is why indexing is step one of the checklist rather than a technical footnote at the end.

Can you audit your own website without SEO tools?

Yes, for the majority of it. Google Search Console is free and covers indexing and search performance. PageSpeed Insights is free and covers load time. An AI assistant can review your page content, titles, and structure if you paste them in. Paid tools mainly save time on crawling large sites.

Should a website audit include AI search visibility?

It should now. Buyers increasingly ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews for recommendations before they ever open a search results page. A site can rank well in Google and still be invisible to those systems, so a 2026 audit checks both.

The Checklist, In Order

  1. 1

    Confirm the site is indexed

    Search "site:yourdomain.com" in Google. If pages are missing, nothing else on this list matters yet. Google Search Console → Pages shows exactly which URLs are excluded and why.

  2. 2

    Check every important page returns a 200

    Broken and redirecting URLs in your own navigation quietly bleed traffic and link equity. Redirect chains are almost as bad as dead links.

  3. 3

    Measure mobile load time

    Run PageSpeed Insights on your homepage and your top service page. Under 2.5 seconds for Largest Contentful Paint is the threshold. Most small business sites fail this on unoptimised images alone.

  4. 4

    Give each page one job

    Two pages targeting the same phrase compete with each other and both lose. One page, one primary search phrase, stated in the title and the first paragraph.

  5. 5

    Put contact above the fold

    Phone number and a form visible without scrolling, on mobile. A site that ranks but hides the phone number is an expensive brochure.

  6. 6

    Match your name, address and phone to Google exactly

    Character-for-character against your Google Business Profile, including suite numbers and abbreviations. Inconsistency here weakens local ranking and confuses AI assistants reading both sources.

  7. 7

    Write unique titles and meta descriptions

    Duplicates across pages are a signal of thin or templated content. Each should read like an answer to a question, not a category label.

  8. 8

    Add structured data for your business type

    Schema markup tells search engines and AI systems what your business is, where it operates, and what it sells. It is the difference between being read and being parsed.

  9. 9

    Connect every page to at least two others

    Orphan pages — reachable only from the sitemap — get crawled rarely and rank poorly. Link with descriptive anchor text, not "click here".

  10. 10

    Ask an AI assistant to recommend businesses like yours

    If ChatGPT and Perplexity do not mention you when asked for the best provider in your area, you have an AI visibility gap that traditional SEO reporting will never show you.

  11. 11

    Check the site works without JavaScript

    Many AI crawlers and automated agents do not execute JavaScript. If your content only appears after a script runs, those systems see an empty page.

  12. 12

    Verify analytics records conversions

    Submit your own form and confirm it appears in analytics. Auditing traffic while conversion tracking is silently broken produces confident, wrong conclusions.

Run the Audit

Paste these into ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity alongside the checklist above. They do the reading and the writing; you supply the judgment about your own business.

The Page Teardown

Get a straight assessment of one page before you rewrite it.

Here is the full text of a page from my website:

[paste the page text]

My business is [what you do] in [city]. The one search phrase I want this page to win is "[phrase]".

Assess it honestly:
1. Does the first paragraph directly answer what someone searching that phrase wants to know? Quote the sentence that does, or tell me none does.
2. Which sentences are filler that could be deleted with no loss?
3. What questions would a buyer have after reading this that the page never answers?
4. Is the call to action clear, and is it in the right place?

Be blunt. Do not compliment the writing.

The Title and Meta Rewrite

Fix the two lines that decide whether anyone clicks.

For a page about [topic] for my [type of business] in [city], targeting the search phrase "[phrase]":

Write 5 title tag options under 60 characters. Each must read like a question or a direct answer, not a category label.

Then write 3 meta description options under 155 characters. Each should follow this structure: a question with its direct answer, then who or where it applies to, then one qualifier or next step.

No marketing adjectives. Nothing I would be embarrassed to say out loud.

The Internal Link Map

Find the orphan pages that are silently wasting your best content.

The Speed Triage

Turn a PageSpeed report into a list your developer can act on.

The Competitor Gap

Perplexity

See what a rival covers that you do not.

Unlock every prompt in the library

One email unlocks the rest of this page and every other page in the library — audit prompts, AI search prompts, marketing prompts, all of it.

No spam. No sales calls unless you ask for one.

The AI Visibility Audit Pack

Four prompts that go past the traditional checklist and test whether AI assistants can find, read, and recommend your business. Tell us your website and we will look at it ourselves before we get in touch — no automated report, an actual person.

The AI Visibility Audit

ChatGPT

Find out whether ChatGPT recommends you — and why it does not.

The Source Map

Perplexity

See which sites AI pulls from, so you know where to get listed.

The Agent Readability Test

Claude

Check whether an automated agent can actually use your site.

The Citation Rewrite

Rewrite a page so AI engines can quote it cleanly.

The AI Visibility Audit Pack

Tell us where to look and we'll go through your site ourselves before we get in touch.

No automated report. Ryan or Amira will look at your site and reach out personally.

Frequently Asked Questions

How often should you audit your website?

A full audit once a year, and the first three checks — indexing, status codes, and load time — once a quarter. Audit immediately after any redesign, platform migration, or hosting change, because those are when pages silently disappear from the index.

What is the difference between a website audit and an SEO audit?

An SEO audit looks at what affects search rankings. A website audit is broader: it also covers whether the site converts, whether contact paths work, and whether analytics is recording anything useful. A site can pass an SEO audit and still fail to generate a single lead.

Do these prompts work in ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity?

Most work in any of the three. Where one is clearly better suited it is labelled — Perplexity for anything requiring live research and citations, Claude for reading a page as an agent would, ChatGPT for testing recommendation behaviour. Swap freely; the structure of the prompt matters more than the engine.

Will an AI assistant audit my site accurately?

It is accurate about structure, clarity, and gaps in coverage, because it is reading what you paste in. It is not reliable for anything requiring live data — search volumes, ranking positions, or traffic numbers. If a model volunteers a specific statistic about your site, treat it as invented until a real tool confirms it.

What should you fix first after an audit?

Anything preventing pages from being found or loaded: indexing problems, broken URLs, and mobile load time. Those three block everything downstream. Content and structured data improvements only pay off once the pages they apply to can actually be reached.

Keep Going

More Prompts

Sources

Ready to Get More Leads?

Get a free marketing audit for your contracting business. We'll show you exactly where you're losing leads.

Get Your Free Audit