How to Run a Complete Technical SEO Audit for Free (No Paid Tools)

Quick answer: You can run a full technical SEO audit in your browser, free, in about 30 minutes. Check 7 things, in this order:

• Find 404s and broken links
• Trace redirect chains and loops
• Catch duplicate-URL (canonical) problems
• Confirm Google can index the page
• Fix titles and meta for click-through
• Validate schema and Core Web Vitals
• Check whether ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity can crawl you

I run this exact workflow with scrawl.tools, a free set of 50+ SEO tools that cover the whole checklist in your browser, no login and no crawler licence. Most audits sold for money are this same checklist with a logo on the PDF. Here's the version that costs nothing.

Stage 1: Check crawl health

Start with what's already broken. Dead links waste crawl budget and leak the internal link equity you worked to build.

Paste a batch of URLs into the Bulk Status Checker to flag every 404, 500, and redirect across hundreds of pages at once. Then run the Broken Link Checker on your top pages for dead internal and outbound links.

What I look for first: any money page (pricing, contact, services) returning something other than 200, and any 404 that still has internal links pointing at it.

Stage 2: Trace your redirects

One redirect is fine. A chain of 3 is a slow page and wasted PageRank.

Run the Redirect Chain Checker on your homepage and a few key URLs. It draws every hop and catches loops. If http goes to https goes to www goes to a trailing slash, that's 3 hops you can collapse into 1.

Stage 3: Catch duplicate-URL problems

This is where I find the most damage, every time.

On a content-heavy site I audited recently, Google had indexed two copies of nearly every page: one on www and one on the bare domain. The canonical tag pointed one way, the redirect went another, and the ranking signals were split in half. Months of work carrying half the authority it should have.

Run the Canonical Checker to confirm each page names one canonical URL, and that it matches where your redirects actually send people. Pick one host (www or non-www), 301 everything to it, and make every canonical agree.

Stage 4: Confirm the page is indexable

A page can rank only if Google can index it. A stray noindex, a robots.txt block, or a canonical pointing elsewhere will quietly keep you out.

The Google Index Checker tells you in one pass whether a URL is indexed and, if not, which of those causes is to blame. Run it on any page that should be ranking but isn't showing up.

Stage 5: Fix titles and meta for clicks

Ranking isn't the finish line. The click is.

On that same site, one guide pulled over 8,000 impressions a month and 5 clicks, sitting at position 11. The title was a 70-character wall of text that Google truncated mid-sentence. Rewriting the title and meta description is the cheapest traffic you will ever get: same ranking, more clicks, no new content.

Use the Title Tag Checker and Meta Description Checker to find titles that are too long, duplicated, or generic. Then preview the rewrite in the SERP Snippet Previewer before you ship it, so you see exactly what searchers will.

Stage 6: Validate schema and Core Web Vitals

Structured data is how you earn rich results and how AI engines read your page. One broken field can kill the whole block.

Check your markup with the Schema Checker, and if you're missing schema, build valid JSON-LD with the Structured Data Generator (Article, FAQ, Breadcrumb, LocalBusiness, and more).

For speed, the Core Web Vitals Checker gives you LCP, CLS, and INP with mobile vs desktop side by side. Fix the mobile numbers first. That's what most of your traffic sees.

Stage 7: Check if AI can crawl you

This stage didn't exist 2 years ago. It matters now. On some sites I track, ChatGPT and Claude already send as much traffic as Google does, and they cite only what they can crawl.

Run the AI Crawler Accessibility Checker to see whether GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot are allowed in your robots.txt, and whether your structured data is clean enough to be cited. Then generate an llms.txt file: a plain-text map that points AI engines at your best pages.

Where free tools are enough, and where they're not

I'll be straight about this, because the "free vs paid" debate is mostly marketing.

For a site under a few thousand pages, browser tools cover roughly 90% of a real technical audit. Status codes, redirects, canonicals, schema, titles, Core Web Vitals: a paid platform checks these the same way a free one does. Paying a monthly fee to read an HTTP header is wasted money.

Paid platforms still win in 3 cases: scheduled crawls of very large sites (100,000+ URLs), historical tracking over months, and backlink analysis. If you need those, a tool like Screaming Frog or Ahrefs earns its price. If you're auditing your own site or a client's before a migration, free is enough. scrawl.tools has honest comparisons for each of these if you want to see the line for yourself.

Start with the Redirect Chain Checker and the Canonical Checker. Those 2 catch the most damage in the least time, and they're where I'd want you to look first.