Technical Audit tool for single pages and full-site history

Published March 10, 2026 · Updated August 14, 2026 · 9 min read

What Foglift's Full-Site Technical Analysis Shows

A completed Launch, Growth, or Enterprise run turns the captured crawl into a deterministic site report. Foglift computes these checks from the pages, redirects, sitemap documents, robots.txt, and AI guidance files already collected during the run. The analysis does not require an additional model call.

Every issue keeps bounded URL evidence in the immutable run report, so a team can move from a site-wide count to the affected pages. Historical runs that predate a report slice say that the evidence was not captured instead of reconstructing it from newer site state.

What Is a Website Audit?

A website audit is a comprehensive checkup of your site's health. Foglift calls the product version a Technical Audit because it checks the technical foundation that determines whether your website attracts visitors, loads fast, stays secure, works for everyone, and can be extracted by AI answer engines:

• SEO (Search Engine Optimization): Can Google find and understand your pages? Are you ranking for the right keywords?
• Performance: How fast does your site load? Slow pages can delay discovery and frustrate visitors.
• Security: Are your HTTP headers configured correctly? Is your SSL certificate valid? Are you protecting user data?
• Accessibility: Can people with disabilities use your site? Do the tested pages meet the applicable WCAG criteria?
• AI Readiness: Can ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and Google AI Overview extract clear facts, FAQs, citations, and entity signals from your pages?

Why You Need a Website Audit (Even If Things Look Fine)

Most website problems are invisible. Your site might look perfect to you while search engines can't index it, mobile users are bouncing, AI crawlers cannot parse the page, or security headers are misconfigured. Here's what a real audit uncovers:

• Missing or duplicated meta descriptions across important pages
• Images without alt text (hurting SEO and accessibility simultaneously)
• A missing or weak Content Security Policy that leaves fewer browser-side controls against injected content
• Render-blocking CSS that delays the page's main content
• Broken internal links that stop visitors and crawlers from reaching intended pages
• Vague homepage copy that makes AI answers describe your brand inaccurately

For a printable, step-by-step version of this process, see our Website Audit Checklist for 2026. It covers every item you need to check, organized by priority. For the AI visibility layer after the technical audit, see AI search monitoring.

How to Audit Your Website: Step by Step

Step 1: Check Your SEO Fundamentals

Start with the elements that help crawlers discover a page and help searchers understand its result. Google's title guidance recommends descriptive, concise text, while its snippet guidance calls for page-specific meta descriptions. Neither document publishes a fixed character limit.

• Does every page have a distinct, descriptive, concise title tag?
• Does every important page have an accurate, page-specific meta description?
• Does the page use a clear primary heading and a logical heading hierarchy?
• Do informative images have descriptive alt attributes and decorative images use empty alt attributes?
• Is your site generating a valid XML sitemap?
• Do you have a robots.txt file that allows search engine crawling?

Google's crawling and indexing documentation is the primary reference for robots.txt, sitemaps, canonicals, redirects, and crawlable links.

Step 2: Measure Performance

Google's page-experience guidance says its ranking systems use Core Web Vitals, while also warning that good scores do not guarantee a top ranking. Start with the website performance fixes that change real load time, then track the three current Core Web Vitals and their good thresholds:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Should be 2.5 seconds or less. This is how fast the main content appears.
• Interaction to Next Paint (INP): Should be 200ms or less. This measures responsiveness to user input.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Should be 0.1 or less. This measures visual stability (things jumping around).

Step 3: Verify Security Headers

These HTTP response headers give browsers enforceable rules for loading resources, framing pages, upgrading connections, interpreting content types, and sharing referrer data. Check the MDN HTTP header reference and OWASP Secure Headers Project against your threat model. For implementation details and safe defaults, use the security overview.

• Content-Security-Policy restricts which resources a browser may load
• X-Frame-Options restricts whether other pages may frame the response
• Strict-Transport-Security tells browsers to use HTTPS for future requests
• X-Content-Type-Options disables MIME type sniffing for supported resource types
• Referrer-Policy controls how much referrer information accompanies requests

Step 4: Test Accessibility

Accessibility checks help more people use your site and expose interaction problems that visual inspection can miss. Key checks:

• Sufficient color contrast (at least 4.5:1 for normal text, subject to WCAG's defined exceptions)
• Keyboard navigation works for all interactive elements
• Form fields have associated labels
• ARIA attributes are used correctly
• Page structure uses semantic HTML (nav, main, article, etc.)

Step 5: Check AI Readiness

AI answer engines need more than a crawlable page. They need extractable facts, clear entity descriptions, source formatting, and a page structure that maps to the questions buyers actually ask.

• State who you serve, what you do, and what category you belong to in plain language
• Add FAQ sections for high-intent buyer questions
• Use comparison tables where buyers need to evaluate alternatives
• Link claims to primary sources, current research, or your own methodology
• Set separate robots.txt policies for search, user-requested retrieval, and training crawlers. OpenAI and Anthropic document distinct user agents for these jobs, so a site can allow search eligibility without adopting one blanket policy. Review the full policy in our AI search optimization mistakes guide.

The Easy Way: Automated Technical Auditing

Manually checking all of this is tedious and error-prone. That's why tools likeFoglift exist. Enter your URL and get a comprehensive analysis across all five categories in seconds, with prioritized recommendations in plain English.

Foglift offers unlimited single-page Technical Audits on every plan, with prioritized findings, shareable results, and PDF export. Launch adds weekly full-site coverage of up to 100 pages, daily monitoring across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overview, plus API, CLI, and MCP access for $49 per month. The full workflow is explained in how Foglift works.

Frequently Asked Questions

Related: Learn about AEO (Answer Engine Optimization), the framework for making your content extractable by AI answer engines.

Fundamentals: Learn about GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) and AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) (the two frameworks for optimizing your content for AI search engines).