What a technical audit covers
A useful technical audit answers four questions in order: can crawlers reach the site, are they allowed to index the pages, do the pages tell a consistent story about which URL is canonical, and is the content and its markup worth keeping.
The order of fixes matters
Fixing a title before fixing a robots block is wasted effort, because the page cannot be crawled. Work down from the foundation.
- Reachability: does the site answer an outside request with a 200, over https, without a bot challenge?
- Indexation: robots.txt, noindex, canonicals and status codes for the key pages.
- Discovery: a valid sitemap, internal links that reach the pages, and no orphans.
- Content: unique titles and descriptions, real headings, and pages that are not thin or duplicated.
- Performance: real-user Core Web Vitals, image weight, compression and delivery.
What the free audit checks
One crawl of a bounded sample of your pages runs every check that fits your site: reachability, indexation, robots.txt, sitemap health, structured data, canonicals, duplicate content, internal links, trust pages and AI crawler access. A store also gets catalogue, price and availability checks. Every finding names the page and the fix.
What it does not do
It samples rather than crawling the whole site, so it is a snapshot of the pages it fetched, not an exhaustive export. It reads only publicly visible data, so it does not see your Merchant Center feed or your private Search Console account unless you connect them. Treat it as a fast, honest first pass, not a replacement for a full crawl on a very large site.