A free Semrush account will crawl 100 pages of your website and hand back a ranked list of what’s broken. We ran that audit on a real site, left every setting at its default, and copied every number off the screen. Here’s what came back, what each number means, and how fast the free crawl budget runs out.
What This Semrush Site Audit Review Covers
This review follows one free Semrush Site Audit from the setup screen to the results, and checks each number against Semrush’s own documentation, which says the tool runs “over 140 on-page and technical SEO checks” (Semrush Site Audit).
Search for “semrush site audit” in the US and Semrush owns almost every top result. Those pages describe the feature well. What they don’t show is a first audit on a small, young website, with every default left in place, and an outside read of where the free account stops.
We’re an independent site that tests creator tools on free plans and no-card trials. For this review we audited a small marketing website our own team runs, on a free account, on October 21, 2026.
If you want the wider picture of the free account, including keyword research, backlinks and rank tracking, our review of what a free Semrush account gets you covers all four tools we tested. This article goes deeper on Site Audit alone: the settings, the score, the issue list, the AI checks and the limits.
Why give one tool a whole article? Because Site Audit is the part of a free Semrush account you’re most likely to act on. Keyword data tells you what to write next. An audit tells you what’s broken today.
Key Takeaways
A free Semrush account can crawl 100 pages a month in Site Audit, with one audit running at a time (Semrush Site Audit). That budget covered a first audit of our test site, stopping at the cap, and returned a Site Health score, a ranked issue list, a page-by-page status and a separate AI search score. The catch is the default weekly schedule. Under Semrush’s own limits, the free monthly budget covers one full audit, so plan any re-run around the monthly reset.
Quick Verdict: Is the Free Semrush Site Audit Worth Running?
Yes, if you run one site and care most about its first 100 pages: our free audit crawled 100 of 100 pages in a few minutes and returned a Site Health score of 89%, an AI Search Health score of 95% and a ranked list of top issues. No, if your site is much larger or you want weekly tracking, because Semrush caps the free crawl at 100 pages per month (Semrush Site Audit).
| What we found | |
|---|---|
| Best for | One small website and a first technical checkup |
| What we ran | One audit, default settings, crawl starting from the homepage |
| Result | Site Health 89%, 97 errors, 159 warnings, AI Search Health 95% |
| Biggest free limits | 100 pages per audit and per month; no JavaScript rendering |
| Not tested by us | Re-crawls, changed settings, exports, issue detail views |
Want to run the same check? Semrush’s Site Audit feature page is where the tool starts, and the Site Audit documentation lists every report. If you only want a one-off score without creating a project, Semrush also runs a separate free SEO Checker, which says it is “Powered by Semrush Site Audit.”
Is the free audit enough to replace a paid crawler on a big site? No. It is enough to find the problems that matter most on a small one, this week, at no cost.
How We Ran the Audit
We ran one Site Audit on October 21, 2026, on a free Semrush account created with Google sign-in and no card, and we kept every setting at its default. We opened Site Audit, pressed “Start SEO Audit,” accepted the General settings screen as it was and pressed “Start audit.” The audit finished in a few minutes.
The test site is a small marketing website our own team runs. It’s young and has few links, which makes it a fair stand-in for most readers of this review: a creator, a freelancer or a small business without an SEO agency.
One detail matters for reading our results. The crawl stopped at exactly 100 of 100 pages, the free cap. With the default crawl source, Site Audit follows links “starting from the homepage,” so our audit covered the first 100 pages the crawler reached, not necessarily every page on the site (Semrush).
Here’s what we did not do: change any crawler setting, open the detail view of any issue, re-run the audit, export a report or fix anything. Every number in this review comes from the setup screen and the Overview report, copied from the screen and backed by masked screenshots.
Why stick to the defaults? Because that’s what most first-time users do. The defaults show you what Semrush thinks a beginner needs, and that’s the audit you’ll actually get.
Setting Up an Audit: The Defaults You Get
Semrush’s setup wizard has five steps, and only the first is required; Semrush says “Steps 2 to 5 of the setup wizard are optional” (Semrush). Our wizard listed them as General, Crawler, Allow/disallow rules, URL parameter rules and Restrictions to bypass, with the last four marked “optional.”
The General step we used
Our General settings screen showed four fields and a checkbox:
- Scope: our domain, “including all subdomains”
- Limit per audit: 100 pages
- Pages to crawl: Website, described as “Internally linked pages, starting from the homepage.”
- Schedule: “Weekly, Every Friday”
- A ticked box for “Send an email once an audit is complete”
Semrush’s documentation fills in the options we didn’t open. The schedule can be weekly on any day, daily, or once, and you can re-run an audit at any time. There are four crawl sources: Website, Robots.txt sitemap, Sitemap by URL, and Import URLs from file (Semrush).
The crawl source matters more on a free account than on a paid one. Semrush warns that the Website option “finds the pages most accessible from your homepage, which aren’t always your most important ones.” With only 100 pages to spend, the file option is the smarter pick once you know your key pages: Semrush says it lets you “check specific pages and conserve crawl budget.”
The optional steps we skipped
We left steps 2 to 5 untouched. Here’s what each one controls, according to Semrush:
| Setting | Options Semrush lists | What we saw or what applies on a free account |
|---|---|---|
| User agent | SiteAuditBot (Mobile), the default; SiteAuditBot (Desktop); OpenAI-Search | Our results header read “Mobile” |
| Crawl delay | Minimum (about 1 second between pages), 1 URL per 2 seconds, Respect robots.txt | Default: Minimum |
| JS rendering | On or off | Guru or Business SEO Toolkit only; our header read “JS rendering: Disabled” |
| Allow/disallow rules | Subfolders to crawl or skip | Not used |
| URL parameter rules | Parameters to ignore, such as page or UTM tags | Not used |
| Restrictions to bypass | Verification file for robots.txt blocks, login credentials, Web Bot Auth signature | Not used |
Source for the options: Configuring Site Audit.
Two details are easy to miss. First, the allow and disallow paths need a trailing slash; Semrush says that if you enter /shoes instead of /shoes/, the audit also skips every URL that starts with /shoes, such as a /shoes-men page. Second, the OpenAI-Search user agent lets you check “whether your site is crawlable by OpenAI’s search bot,” which is a quick test if you care about ChatGPT search.
Does a free user need any of this? Mostly no. The one setting worth a look on day one is the crawl source, because it decides which 100 pages you spend your budget on.
Site Health 89%: What the Score Means
Our site scored 89% Site Health, against 92% for what Semrush labels “Top-10% websites.” Semrush describes that benchmark as “the average Site Health score among the top 10% of sites (in terms of Site Health score) across all industries,” and you can switch it to your own industry from a drop-down (Semrush).
So how does Semrush get to a number like 89%? The Overview documentation says the score is “a percentage between 0% and 100%” that weighs the errors and warnings found in the crawl against the number of checks performed (Semrush Site Audit Overview). Errors weigh more than warnings. Notices don’t affect the score at all (Semrush).
A few rules from Semrush’s scoring page change how you should read your own number:
- The score doesn’t depend on how many pages were crawled. What counts is how often each issue type shows up.
- Clearing every instance of a single check, such as all broken links, lifts the score more than clearing one error each from two different checks.
- The score can fall even when your total issue count falls, if a new crawl finds one heavy issue while you cleared several light ones.
- Turning on JS rendering can lower the score, because the crawler sees more content and finds more problems.
- Hidden and excluded checks stop counting toward the score.
That last rule deserves a warning. Hiding an issue raises Site Health without fixing anything. Semrush built the option for checks that don’t apply to your site, and it’s fine for that. Just don’t use it to make a number look better in a client report.
Is 89% good, then? What surprised us was how little the score said on its own. A site three points from the top-10% benchmark still had a broken-link problem on 93 of its 100 crawled pages. Treat the score as a trend line to watch over time, and treat the issue list as the actual work.
Errors, Warnings and the Top Issues List
Our audit found 97 errors and 159 warnings, and the Top issues panel was led by broken internal links on 93 pages. Semrush says the panel shows issues “based on their priority level and the number of pages with said issue” (Semrush Site Audit Overview).
Here are the five issues our Top issues panel listed, with the severity Semrush assigns each one in its full issue list:
| Issue on our screen | Pages affected | Severity in Semrush’s issue list |
|---|---|---|
| Broken internal links | 93 | Error |
| Low text to HTML ratio | 89 | Warning |
| Low word count | 36 | Warning |
| Content not optimized for AI Search | 4 | Notice (AI Search) |
| 4xx errors | 1 | Error |
Severity source: What Issues Can Site Audit Identify?. Our Overview screen matched it: the broken-link and 4xx rows carried the red error icon, and the two content rows carried the orange warning icon.
What the three severity levels mean
Semrush defines errors as “the most severe issues on your site,” warnings as “issues of medium severity,” and notices as issues that “don’t impact your overall site health score” (Semrush). The full list runs to dozens of checks in each group, from missing title tags and 5XX status codes among the errors to missing alt attributes and temporary redirects among the warnings.
Every issue comes with a “How to fix” note, and our Overview showed that link next to each top issue. Click the page count instead, and Semrush opens a list of every URL with that issue, which you can filter by subfolder.
Reading a number like 93 broken pages
Should 93 broken pages out of 100 scare you? Not before you open the list. When nearly every page shares one problem, the cause often sits in a shared part of the template, such as the main menu or the footer. One fix there could clear the whole row. We didn’t open the detail view in this test, so we can’t say which link it was on our site, and that’s the first thing we’d check next.
The two warnings are a different kind of problem. Low word count and a low text-to-HTML ratio often show up on short pages that carry a lot of template code: contact pages, category pages, thin landing pages. Some of those pages should stay short. Our advice: decide page by page whether more text would help the reader, rather than padding every page until the warning goes away.
Crawled Pages: Healthy, Broken, Have Issues and Blocked
Every crawled page landed in one of five groups, and ours split into 4 Healthy, 2 Broken, 93 Have issues, 0 Redirects and 1 Blocked. Semrush’s Overview report shows “exactly how many pages were found healthy, broken, having issues, redirects, or blocked our crawler” (Semrush Site Audit Overview).
Does that split mean 93 pages are in trouble? Not necessarily. It follows from the issue list: a page counts as having issues if any check fires on it, and broken internal links fired on 93 pages. Fix one template-level link problem and many of those pages could move to Healthy at once.
The Crawled Pages report
The Crawled Pages tab lists every page with its status, and you can add columns such as Internal Link Rank, Blocked AI Search Bots, Status Code, Crawl Depth, Load Time, Markup and Sitemap (Semrush Crawled Pages report). Semrush’s own best practice there: “Keep your most important content at a crawl depth of 3 or less, and make sure it appears in your sitemap.”
The most useful feature for a free account sits in the last column. The Reaudit button “sends SiteAuditBot to that page only,” which Semrush calls a way to track fixes “without spending crawl budget on a full audit.” When you have 100 pages a month, re-checking the one page you just fixed beats re-running the whole audit.
The Statistics tab
The Statistics tab adds charts for HTTP status codes, Sitemap vs. Crawled Pages, crawl depth, internal links and markup types (Semrush Site Audit Statistics). Semrush notes that with “a crawl depth of 4+, there is a possibility that a user or bot won’t even reach the page.”
Because our crawl stopped at the 100-page cap, the Sitemap vs. Crawled Pages chart is where we’d look next to see how much of the site the free audit left out. We didn’t open it in this round.
AI Search Health and the Blocked from AI Search Panel
Our site scored 95% AI Search Health, marked beta, with the note “Website is better optimized for AI search engines” and a link to 4 issues. Semrush calls the score “a score that reflects how optimized your website is for AI search” (Semrush AI Search Health).
Semrush builds the score from three inputs:
- AI search checks in Site Audit, such as crawlability, structured data and internal linking
- AI bot access, meaning whether robots.txt blocks crawlers like OAI-SearchBot or PerplexityBot
- Technical readiness, such as schema markup, crawlable navigation, internal links and llms.txt
The AI Search checks themselves sit in the notices group of Semrush’s issue list: llms.txt not found, llms.txt formatting issues, too much content, outdated content, low semantic HTML usage and content not optimized (Semrush). Because they’re notices, they don’t move Site Health. They do feed the AI Search Health score.
What the Blocked from AI Search panel showed
Next to the score, the Blocked from AI Search panel read “Pages crawled: 100” and listed four bots: ChatGPT-User, OAI-SearchBot, Googlebot and Google-Extended, each with a green check mark, plus a “Show more” link. Semrush says the panel tracks “8 major AI crawlers,” so our view showed half of them. We read the check marks as “not blocked,” but we didn’t open the detail view to confirm.
Semrush’s guide to the panel sorts these bots into types, and the types matter when you decide what to allow (Semrush Blocked from AI Search):
| Bot type | Examples Semrush lists | What blocking it affects |
|---|---|---|
| On-demand fetchers | ChatGPT-User, Claude-User, Perplexity-User | Live answers in AI assistants |
| AI search crawlers | OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Googlebot | Visibility in AI search results |
| AI training bots | Google-Extended, GPTBot, ClaudeBot | Model training, not search visibility |
The surprise for many site owners is Google-Extended. Semrush notes it’s “often mistaken for a search crawler,” but it’s a training control. Blocking it is a content-ownership choice, not an SEO mistake.
Does this panel replace a dedicated AI visibility tool? No. It tells you whether AI crawlers can reach your pages, not whether AI answers mention you. For that question, see our hands-on comparison of Otterly.AI and Writesonic, and for what gets a site cited, our guide on earning ChatGPT citations step by step.
What to Fix First: Turning the Issue List Into a Plan
Fix errors before warnings, and within the errors start with the check that hits the most pages; Semrush says errors “have more impact on your Site Health Score than warnings,” so it recommends you “address errors first” (Semrush). We didn’t fix anything during this test, so this plan comes from Semrush’s documentation and our own reading of the results.
Here’s the order we’d use on an audit like ours:
- Pick the error with the largest page count and look for a shared cause in the template.
- Clear the remaining errors, such as the single 4xx page, one by one.
- Review content warnings page by page and decide which pages truly need more text.
- Look at the AI Search notices last; they won’t move Site Health, but they do feed AI Search Health.
- Hide only the checks that truly don’t apply to your site, and write down why.
How do you prove a fix worked without burning the monthly budget? Use the Reaudit button on the fixed pages first. After a full re-run, Semrush’s Compare Crawls tab lets you “compare results between any two audits, dating back to your very first audit,” with columns for Fixed and New issues, and the Progress tab draws a line graph across General, Errors, Warnings and Notices (Semrush Compare Crawls and Progress).
Sharing the results
If someone else does the fixing, Site Audit has several ways to hand over the list. Semrush documents exports for Crawled Pages, Crawled Pages with Issues, Crawled Pages with markup, Issues, Compare Crawls and an All reports bundle, plus a PDF you can email, schedule or brand with a logo (Semrush Exporting Site Audit Results). Our results screen showed PDF, Export, Share and Looker Studio buttons. The Issues report also has a “Send to Trello” option for each issue.
One storage rule is worth knowing: Semrush keeps Site Audit data “for up to 1 year after the last crawl,” and removes a campaign that isn’t re-run in that time (Semrush Site Audit Overview). Export your first audit if you want a permanent before-and-after record.
Free Account Limits vs Paid Site Audit Limits
A free account gets 100 pages per month, 100 pages per audit and one audit at a time, while the paid SEO Toolkit tiers go up to 1,000,000 pages per month (Semrush Site Audit). Here are the limits Semrush lists for each tier:
| Tier | Pages per month | Pages per audit | Audits at once | JS rendering |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Without SEO Toolkit (free) | 100 | 100 | 1 | No |
| Pro SEO Toolkit | 100,000 | 20,000 | 2 | No |
| Guru SEO Toolkit | 300,000 | 20,000 | 2 | Yes |
| Business SEO Toolkit | 1,000,000 | 100,000 | 5 | Yes |
The same page maps the newer plan names onto these tiers: “Semrush One Starter includes Pro SEO Toolkit,” Pro+ includes Guru, and Advanced includes Business. It also notes that AMP checks need the Business tier. On the public pricing page, Starter costs $199/month, Pro+ $299/month and Advanced is custom, with a lower-priced SEO plan at $139/month (Semrush pricing). The Site Audit page doesn’t say which tier that SEO plan maps to, so check the plan comparison before you buy for crawl limits. For the full plan breakdown, see our Semrush pricing guide.
The free budget and the weekly default
Here’s the part that trips up free users. The default schedule re-runs the audit every week, but Semrush says the monthly page budget doesn’t roll over and resets “on the 1st day of every month.” Our first audit used all 100 pages. By Semrush’s own numbers, that leaves no pages for the scheduled re-runs later in the same month. We haven’t seen a scheduled re-run yet, so we can’t show what the screen does when the budget is empty.
What can you do about it? Three options, all from Semrush’s documentation:
- Switch the schedule to “Once” and run the audit by hand at the start of each month.
- Use Import URLs from file to spend the 100 pages on the pages that matter.
- Use the Reaudit button on single pages between full audits.
The free SEO Checker is a separate route. Its page describes it as a “quick snapshot of your SEO health,” while Site Audit “crawls your entire site” and “lets you schedule automatic audits” (Semrush SEO Checker). We haven’t tested the checker, so we can’t say how its results compare with a full audit. For other ways to run a quick check, see our guide to SEO tools to check a website.
Where Position Tracking and Backlink Analytics Fit
Site Audit lives inside a Semrush project, next to other Website Monitoring campaigns such as Position Tracking, Backlink Audit and On Page SEO Checker; deleting the project removes all of them (Semrush Site Audit). In our test, we ran two of the neighboring tools on the same free account and the same site.
Backlink Analytics returned 46 referring domains and an Authority Score of 7, labeled “Low authority.” That fits the audit: a young site with few links, where internal fixes matter more than outreach for now.
Position Tracking let us add 1 of 10 allowed keywords, offered ChatGPT and Gemini as search engines next to Google, and then showed “Gathering keywords data: 0/1.” We had no ranking result when we wrote our log. Our Semrush Position Tracking guide covers setup, engines and limits.
How do the three tools work together? Site Audit fixes what’s broken, Backlink Analytics shows who links to you, and Position Tracking shows whether the fixes move rankings. Our hands-on look at four free Semrush tools has the full numbers for all three. If rank tracking is your main need, compare options in our guide to the best rank tracker software; for links, see our backlink checkers compared.
What We Could Not Test on a Free Account
Four parts of Site Audit stayed out of reach in our single free-account test: a scheduled re-crawl, any paid limit, a re-run after fixes, and every non-default setting. Semrush’s paid tiers raise the per-audit cap to 20,000 or 100,000 pages (Semrush Site Audit), and we had no way to check that without paying.
- Scheduled re-crawl. Our audit ran on a Wednesday; the default schedule points to Fridays, and the free budget was already used.
- Paid limits and JS rendering. Both need a paid tier, and our rule is no card, no paid plan.
- Re-run after fixes, Compare Crawls and Progress. These need at least two audits.
- Changed settings, issue detail views, the Blocked from AI Search detail and exports. We kept this round to the defaults and the Overview screen.
Why list what’s missing? Because a review that guesses reads the same as one that tested. We’d rather show exactly where our evidence stops. When we re-run the audit, we’ll add the results here.
Who Should Use Semrush Site Audit on a Free Account
Use the free Site Audit if you run one small website and want a ranked, plain-language list of technical problems at no cost; our audit surfaced 97 errors on 100 pages, ranked by priority and page count. Budget for a paid tier, or another crawler, if your site has far more than 100 pages or you need JavaScript rendering. This section is our judgment, based on the results and limits in this review.
Here’s how we’d sort readers:
- Bloggers and solo creators: run one audit at the start of each month and fix the biggest error first.
- Small businesses: point the audit at your key pages with a URL file, so the budget covers what customers see.
- Freelancers with clients: one free audit per month won’t stretch across several sites.
- Sites built mostly in JavaScript: the free audit reads HTML only, so it may miss content your visitors see.
Not sure where to start with SEO tools in general? Our beginner’s guide on how to use SEO tools walks through the basics. If you’re weighing other crawlers, our site audit tools comparison puts Semrush next to SE Ranking and Ubersuggest, and the best Semrush alternatives roundup covers cheaper suites.
Further Reading
- Semrush SEO tools review: what a free account gets you
- Semrush keyword research review: what a free account shows
- Otterly.AI vs Writesonic for AI search tracking, tested side by side
References
- Semrush Knowledge Base: Site Audit
- Semrush Knowledge Base: Configuring Site Audit
- Semrush Knowledge Base: How is Site Health Score calculated in the Site Audit tool?
- Semrush Knowledge Base: Site Audit Overview Report
- Semrush Knowledge Base: Reviewing Your Site Audit Issues
- Semrush Knowledge Base: What Issues Can Site Audit Identify?
- Semrush Knowledge Base: Site Audit Crawled Pages Report
- Semrush Knowledge Base: Site Audit Statistics
- Semrush Knowledge Base: Compare Crawls and Progress
- Semrush Knowledge Base: Exporting Site Audit Results
- Semrush Knowledge Base: AI Search Health in Site Audit
- Semrush Knowledge Base: Blocked from AI Search in Site Audit
- Semrush: Site Audit features
- Semrush: Free SEO Checker
- Semrush: SEO + AI Search pricing