Linkstonic’s SEO Audit runs more than 14 automated checks against any URL in seconds, giving you a composite score across technical health, performance, E-E-A-T signals, and on-page SEO. Every failing check comes with an AI-generated explanation that tells you exactly what to fix — no guesswork, no jargon. Use this guide to understand how to run an audit and what each check is measuring.Documentation Index
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Running an audit
Enter your URL
Type or paste the full URL you want to audit into the input field. You can audit any publicly accessible page — your homepage, a landing page, a blog post, or a competitor’s URL.
Click Run Audit
Click Run Audit. Linkstonic fetches and analyzes the page in seconds, running all checks in parallel. You do not need to install anything on your site.
Starter plan accounts are limited to 3 audits per month. Pro and Agency plans include unlimited audits.
Score breakdown
Linkstonic calculates four scores, each out of 100, and combines them into your overall audit score:| Score | What it measures |
|---|---|
| Technical Score | Redirects, broken links, robots.txt, sitemap, security headers, hreflang, and duplicate content |
| Performance Score | PageSpeed Insights scores and Core Web Vitals for mobile and desktop |
| E-E-A-T Score | Expertise, Experience, Authority, and Trustworthiness signals detected on the page |
| SEO Score | HTML quality, schema markup, internal linking, and homepage authority signals |
The 14+ automated checks
1. PageSpeed (PSI) — mobile and desktop performance
1. PageSpeed (PSI) — mobile and desktop performance
Linkstonic calls the Google PageSpeed Insights API for both mobile and desktop and records the scores alongside the four Core Web Vitals:
- LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) — how long the main content takes to load
- FID (First Input Delay) — how quickly the page responds to the first user interaction
- CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) — how much the layout shifts unexpectedly during load
- TTFB (Time to First Byte) — how fast your server starts sending a response
2. Mobile friendliness
2. Mobile friendliness
This check evaluates three signals: the presence and correctness of a
viewport meta tag, the mobile PageSpeed Insights score, and responsive layout signals detected in the page’s markup. A failing result usually means your page lacks a viewport tag or scores below the threshold on mobile PSI. Because Google uses mobile-first indexing, a poor mobile experience directly affects your rankings.3. Broken links
3. Broken links
Linkstonic scans up to 50 links per audit and tests each one for a successful response. It flags links that return 4xx errors (the destination doesn’t exist or is forbidden), 5xx errors (the server is failing), and broken redirect chains (chains that end in an error rather than a valid page). Broken links waste crawl budget, damage user experience, and signal low-quality content to search engines.
4. Schema markup
4. Schema markup
This check detects JSON-LD structured data blocks on the page, identifies the schema types present (such as
Article, Product, FAQPage, or BreadcrumbList), and validates the structure. It also flags opportunities where rich result types are missing — for example, an article page without Article schema or a product page without Product and Review schema. A failing result means you are leaving potential rich results on the table.5. Sitemap
5. Sitemap
Linkstonic fetches and parses your
sitemap.xml, validates its format against the sitemap protocol, reports the total URL count, and surfaces any errors such as malformed entries or inaccessible URLs. A missing or malformed sitemap means search engines may not discover all of your pages, which is especially damaging for large sites or newly published content.6. Robots.txt
6. Robots.txt
This check parses your
robots.txt file, maps out Disallow rules for all user agents, and checks whether any URLs that should be indexable are accidentally blocked. It also flags pages that are disallowed but linked internally or referenced in your sitemap — a common misconfiguration that causes entire sections of a site to disappear from search results.7. Security headers
7. Security headers
Linkstonic checks for six security-related signals:
- HTTPS — the page must be served over a secure connection
- HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security) — instructs browsers to always use HTTPS
- X-Frame-Options — prevents clickjacking by controlling iframe embedding
- CSP (Content Security Policy) — restricts what resources the browser can load
- X-Content-Type-Options — prevents MIME-type sniffing
8. Hreflang
8. Hreflang
For multilingual or multi-regional sites, hreflang tags tell search engines which version of a page to serve to which audience. This check validates the syntax and values of all hreflang tags on the page, verifies that each alternate URL includes a self-referencing hreflang tag, and flags duplicates and invalid locale codes. Misconfigured hreflang is one of the most common causes of international SEO problems.
9. E-E-A-T analysis
9. E-E-A-T analysis
Google’s quality guidelines assess Expertise, Experience, Authority, and Trustworthiness. Linkstonic scans the page and the domain for signals that correlate with strong E-E-A-T:
- Expertise — author bylines, credentials, and bio content
- Experience — first-hand experience signals in content, review markup
- Authority — About page, references, citations, external links to authoritative sources
- Trustworthiness — SSL, privacy policy, contact information, social proof links
10. HTML quality
10. HTML quality
This check audits the fundamental on-page HTML elements that every page should have:
<title>tag — present, not empty, not duplicated<meta name="description">— present and within recommended length<h1>— exactly one per page, contains relevant keywords<html lang>attribute — present and validcharsetdeclaration — present in<head>DOCTYPE— valid HTML5 doctypealttext — images have descriptive alt attributes
11. Redirects
11. Redirects
Linkstonic follows the redirect chain for the audited URL and analyzes the full chain. It flags redirect chains longer than one hop (which dilute link equity and slow page load), redirect loops (which make a page completely inaccessible), and the misuse of 302 (temporary) redirects where 301 (permanent) redirects are appropriate. Every unnecessary redirect hop passes less authority to the destination.
12. Duplicate content
12. Duplicate content
This check compares title tags, meta descriptions, and H1 tags across pages discovered during the crawl. If multiple pages share the same title or description, it creates keyword cannibalization and confuses search engines about which page to rank. A failing result lists the specific duplicate values and the pages they appear on, so you can differentiate or consolidate the affected pages.
13. Homepage authority
13. Homepage authority
14. Internal linking
14. Internal linking
Linkstonic analyzes the internal link graph detected during the crawl and surfaces four metrics:
- Orphan pages — pages that no other internal page links to; crawlers cannot discover them organically
- Deep pages — pages that require more than three clicks from the homepage to reach; these typically receive little crawl attention and link equity
- Average links per page — the mean number of internal links across crawled pages, benchmarked against healthy ranges
- Anchor text distribution — a breakdown of the anchor text used in internal links, highlighting over-optimized exact-match anchors or generic anchors like “click here”