The best website audit tools
of 2027, ranked honestly.
Ten tools — crawlers, SEO suites, free scanners, and us. Ranked on published criteria, with strengths and weaknesses stated plainly, and this site placed where it actually deserves: which is not #1, and we'll show the math.
The ranking, in one paragraph
Five questions the ranking answers
Most "best tools" roundups rank by affiliate payout. This one ranks on five criteria we publish up front, and every tool is scored on the same five — including the one we sell. If you disagree with the criteria, the ranking is easy to argue with, which is the point.
| Criterion | What it measures | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| 1 · Crawl depth | How many pages it can check and how deep the technical analysis goes. | A one-page scorecard can miss what a 10,000-URL crawl finds. |
| 2 · Interpreted findings | Raw data vs. plain-language, prioritized findings you can act on. | A 400-row export is not a diagnosis; someone still has to read it. |
| 3 · Security pack | TLS configuration & legacy protocols, certificate expiry, session-cookie flags, server version banners. | The checks free scanners almost never run — yet they are what turns a browser bar "Not secure". |
| 4 · AI-readiness | Whether the site can be read and cited by AI answer engines (structured data, llms.txt, metadata). | The 2027 audit category: buyers increasingly ask ChatGPT before they ask Google. |
| 5 · Runs itself | Setup effort, expertise required, and the price model (one-time vs. subscription). | £7.99 once and £139/month are different purchases for different people. |
Prices and capabilities verified against vendor pages in October 2026; re-verified at every yearly refresh. Vendor prices are approximate list prices in USD unless marked.
The ranking
Ranked on the five criteria above. Scroll to #10 for the honest part: where the tool that runs this site lands, and why that is the right place for it.
1 · Screaming Frog SEO Spider
Best for: SEO professionals who want the deepest customizable crawl in the industry.
Strengths: the de-facto standard desktop crawler — full-site technical crawls, custom extraction, JavaScript rendering, integrations with PageSpeed APIs; exports fit any workflow. The free tier covers sites up to 500 URLs.
Weaknesses: it hands you data, not conclusions — you are the analyst. Desktop app, so no scheduled cloud runs. It does not score security headers, certificates or cookies, and has no AI-readiness layer.
Price: free up to 500 URLs; licence £199/year.
2 · Sitebulb
Best for: consultants who want a crawler whose output already reads like an audit.
Strengths: prioritized "hints" attached to findings, crawl visualizations, and audit-style reporting — the closest a crawler gets to interpretation.
Weaknesses: subscription pricing and a real learning curve; still SEO-centric — no security pack, no AI-readiness scoring.
Price: from about $18/month (desktop); cloud plans cost more.
3 · Semrush (Site Audit)
Best for: marketing teams that want site audits inside a full toolkit.
Strengths: scheduled cloud crawls, thematic reports (crawlability, HTTPS, Core Web Vitals), log-file analysis, and integration with keyword, rank and backlink data.
Weaknesses: broad rather than deep on any single site; you still interpret everything; the price buys a suite you may only use a slice of.
Price: limited free account; paid from about $139.95/month.
4 · Ahrefs Site Audit
Best for: SEOs who want technical audits next to backlink and rank data.
Strengths: scheduled cloud crawls with clean issue prioritization and "what changed" tracking, sitting directly beside the industry's best link index.
Weaknesses: suite pricing; no security headers, TLS, certificate or cookie scoring; no AI-readiness layer.
Price: from about $129/month (Lite); higher tiers for volume.
5 · SE Ranking
Best for: budget-conscious teams that still want an all-in-one suite.
Strengths: most of the suite feature set — site audit, rank tracking, white-label reports — at a fraction of Semrush's price; a sensible default for freelancers.
Weaknesses: crawler depth trails Screaming Frog and Sitebulb; same do-it-yourself model — the data is only as good as the person reading it.
Price: from about $65/month.
6 · WooRank
Best for: agencies generating automated, branded website reviews at volume.
Strengths: instant scored review of any URL, white-label PDF reports, and a review funnel that works well for prospecting.
Weaknesses: the crawl is shallow next to dedicated crawlers; subscription-only with no one-time option; pricing is quote-led, so plan a call before you budget.
Price: paid plans only — check current pricing with the vendor.
7 · Google Lighthouse / PageSpeed Insights
Best for: a free, authoritative performance and accessibility check on a page.
Strengths: free, run by Google, and the same engine CI pipelines use; audits performance, SEO basics, accessibility and best practices per page.
Weaknesses: one page at a time in PageSpeed Insights; lab data, not a crawl; zero interpretation; no security pack and no AI-readiness checks.
Price: free.
8 · Google Search Console + Bing Webmaster Tools
Best for: the ground truth about indexing — not a scanner, but never optional.
Strengths: free, first-party data: index coverage, manual actions, security issues, and real-user Core Web Vitals. If Google can't see your pages, no scanner score matters.
Weaknesses: it reports what search engines saw, not what to fix first; no on-page or off-page checks beyond that.
Price: free.
9 · GTmetrix
Best for: ongoing performance monitoring of a handful of important URLs.
Strengths: simple, scheduled re-tests with alerts when a page regresses — a good tripwire after a redesign or migration.
Weaknesses: performance-first and URL-first: it is not a full-site audit and won't surface security, legal, structured-data or AI-readiness issues.
Price: free tier; paid plans add monitoring frequency and slots.
10 · YourSiteIsBroken (that's us)
Best for: site owners who want findings and a plain-language fix plan — once, without learning a tool.
Strengths: 260+ checks across 21 categories, including a live security examination (TLS configuration and legacy protocols, certificate expiry, session-cookie flags, server version banners) and per-rule AI-readiness scoring; an AI analyst writes it all into a consultant-grade, prioritized report delivered as a PDF in about 30 minutes; £7.99 once, no subscription.
Weaknesses — the honest part: capped at 25 pages per run, so it is not a 10,000-URL crawler; no backlink or rank data; no ongoing monitoring; the crawl can't be customized. On all-round capability for practitioners, that is a genuine #10 — see where we fit below.
Price: £7.99 one-time.
Where YourSiteIsBroken actually fits — with our own numbers
Rankings live or die on whether the author shows their work. Here is ours: the real distribution from the full-pipeline audits we have run on real sites.
| Our real numbers (Oct 2026) | Value |
|---|---|
| Full-pipeline audits run to date | 28 sites |
| Median findings per site | 56 |
| Range per site | 11 – 91 findings |
| Total findings logged | 1,460 |
| Severity split (errors / warnings / info) | 167 / 1,093 / 200 |
Pick us when: you own (or market) one site, want the whole picture — SEO, performance, security, accessibility, legal, AI-readiness — in one written report, and want it today for £7.99 rather than a subscription to operate.
Don't pick us when: you need a 10,000-URL crawl, backlink data, rank tracking, or continuous monitoring. For that, tools #1 through #5 on this list earn their subscriptions — here's how the buying options compare, and here's what audits cost at each tier.
Close to one of these shapes? We wrote dedicated guides: website audit for agencies, for e-commerce stores, for local businesses — and the AI visibility test explains the AI-readiness criterion this ranking uses.
What free scanners skip: the security examination
The free tools on this list are excellent at speed, meta and links. Here is what none of them run — the live security examination included with every paid report.
TLS configuration & legacy protocols
We probe the handshakes your server actually accepts — weak ciphers and legacy protocols that still negotiate get flagged, not assumed away.
Certificate expiry
Not just "is there a certificate" — how long is left on it, and what breaks the day it lapses. An expired certificate turns the address bar "Not secure" overnight — our guide covers what that means.
Session-cookie flags
Secure, HttpOnly, SameSite — the three flags that decide whether a session cookie can be stolen or forged. Free graders don't look.
Server version banners
A response header that advertises your exact server and version is a gift to attackers. It takes one header to remove — most sites still ship it.
Fair questions, straight answers
Why do you rank yourselves last?
Because the ranking measures all-round audit capability for practitioners — crawl depth, data integration, scale — and a one-time 25-page done-for-you report genuinely loses to a full crawler or suite on those. We are the best answer for a different job: a site owner who wants findings and a plain-language fix plan once, without operating a tool. Claiming #1 would be exactly the self-serving roundup this page pushes back on.
How were these tools chosen and ranked?
We listed the tools that dominate the website-audit conversation in 2027 — desktop crawlers, SEO suites, free scanners, monitoring — then ranked all ten on the five published criteria in the table above. Prices were verified against vendor pages in October 2026 and are re-checked at every yearly refresh.
Is the free version of Screaming Frog enough?
For a site under 500 URLs and a user comfortable reading crawl exports, yes — it is the same engine as the paid licence with a URL cap. What it will not do is interpret the export, score security headers or certificates, or check whether AI engines can read your site.
Which tool is best for a small business owner?
If you'll personally learn a tool, start free: Lighthouse for one page, Screaming Frog's free tier for a crawl. If you'd rather have someone run the audit and hand you a prioritized, plain-language fix plan, that's the done-for-you category — see a real report before deciding.
When is this ranking updated?
Every January. The edition year is in the title (2027), and each refresh re-verifies every vendor's pricing and feature claims, re-runs our own numbers, and updates the date. Prices quoted here were verified October 2026.
Ranked #10 — and still the right tool for your job.
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