Your traffic graph has been sliding for three months. Down 20%, no penalty notice in Search Console, no obvious culprit. Just a slow leak you can’t explain.
I’ve lived this scenario twice on my own sites and dozens of times with client projects. The first tab I open, every single time, is the Semrush Site Audit report. It turns that vague “something is wrong” feeling into a ranked to-do list.
I’ve run well over 100 audits with it. Here at BriskPick we only review software we’ve actually used, and this one has earned a permanent spot in my workflow. Below you’ll find what’s inside the report, what it costs, where it annoys me, and who should skip it.
## Key Takeaways (TL;DR)
– The report crawls your whole site and grades it 0-100 with the **Site Health score**.
– It runs 140+ technical checks, sorted into errors, warnings, and notices.
– Every issue ships with a plain-English explanation and a fix guide.
– There’s no standalone price. Site Audit comes bundled with every Semrush plan. **Pro starts at $139.95/month**, or roughly 17% less billed annually.
– New users get a **7-day free trial**. The free forever plan allows a very limited audit.
– Best for: agencies, freelancers, content sites, and e-commerce stores.
– Skip it if: you run a five-page brochure site.
– **Our rating: 4.5 out of 5.**
Want to see your own number? **Try Semrush here** and you can have your first crawl kicked off in under 10 minutes.
## What Is the Semrush Site Audit Report?
Semrush is a full SEO suite: keyword research, backlinks, rank tracking, competitor analysis, all behind one login. Site Audit is the technical SEO crawler bolted onto it.
You point it at a domain. It crawls your pages the way Googlebot would, then packages the findings into a report that lives inside a Semrush Project. That report updates on a schedule you set, so you can watch progress week over week.
Think of it as an annual physical for your website, except you can book it weekly and it never gets awkward.
## How to Run Your First Site Audit (Step by Step)
While writing this review I ran a fresh crawl on a 4,000-page blog. Here’s the exact process:
1. **Create a project.** Type your domain into the Semrush dashboard.
2. **Set up the audit.** Choose your page limit, decide which URL parameters to exclude, and pick whether to render JavaScript.
3. **Hit Start Site Audit.** My 4,000-page crawl finished in about 12 minutes. Larger sites take longer.
4. **Read your Site Health score.** One grade from 0 to 100 summarizing overall technical condition.
5. **Open the Issues tab.** This is where the actual work lives.
6. **Sort by severity.** Errors first, then warnings. Ignore most notices early on.
7. **Schedule weekly re-crawls.** Watch the score climb as your fixes land.
One gotcha I learned the hard way: the crawler obeys robots.txt. If your file blocks SemrushBot, the audit will crawl almost nothing and hand you a bizarrely perfect score. Check that file before you celebrate.
## What’s Actually Inside the Report
This is where Semrush pulls ahead of generic SEO checkers. The output is layered, so you can grab a quick pulse or drill into specifics.
### 1. The Site Health Score
One number between 0 and 100, reflecting the share of URLs without serious problems.
Is it perfect? No. A single template-level bug can hit thousands of pages at once and drag that number through the floor. I still think it’s the fastest progress indicator around for weekly tracking. Clients love it too. “We went from 61 to 84” is a sentence every agency person understands without a slide of explanation.
### 2. Thematic Reports
The report splits into focused categories. The ones I open most:
– **Crawlability:** can search engines actually reach and index your pages?
– **Core Web Vitals:** real-user speed data (LCP, INP, CLS) pulled from Google’s CrUX dataset.
– **HTTPS:** certificate problems, mixed content, insecure internal links.
– **Internal Linking:** orphaned pages, broken links, and pages buried too many clicks deep.
– **International Targeting:** hreflang mistakes that quietly wreck multilingual sites.
– **Markup:** structured data and schema errors worth cleaning up.
### 3. The Issues Tab
Every detected problem lands here, grouped by severity. Click any issue and you get:
– A plain-English explanation of what it means
– Why it matters for SEO
– A step-by-step fix guide
– The exact list of affected URLs
– An option to send the fix as a task to a teammate or connected tool
That last bullet matters more than people realize. The gap between knowing about a problem and assigning the fix is where most audits die.
### 4. Crawl Comparison
My favorite underrated feature. Pick any two crawls and see exactly which issues appeared and which ones you resolved. It turns the whole thing into a before-and-after story, perfect for client reports or proving your own work mattered.
### 5. PDF and Branded Reports
You can export a PDF straight from the tool. Guru and higher plans add **My Reports**, a drag-and-drop builder where you assemble branded documents with your logo and email them on a schedule.
## The Issues I Find Most Often (From Real Audits)
After 100+ audits, the same offenders keep showing up:
– **Broken internal links.** Usually left behind by a redesign or a sloppy migration. Nobody notices until a crawler does.
– **Missing or duplicate meta descriptions.** Thousands of pages, a handful of copy-pasted descriptions.
– **Orphaned pages.** Good content with zero internal links pointing to it. Google struggles to find it, and so does your reader.
– **Images without alt text.** The most common notice-level flag on every site I’ve checked.
– **Mixed content.** Pages half-migrated to HTTPS, still pulling scripts over HTTP.
– **Redirect chains.** Page A points to B, which points to C. Every hop wastes crawl budget.
– **Slow load times.** Often an oversized hero image that someone exported at 4MB.
None of these are exotic. That’s the point. Most technical problems are boring and repetitive, and the tool is excellent at spotting them at scale.
## What Site Audit Costs
There’s no separate price tag. The report ships with every Semrush plan, so you’re paying for the bundle even if this is the only tool you care about.
– **Pro:** starts at $139.95/month. Roughly 17% less if you pay annually.
– **Guru and above:** add My Reports for branded PDF reporting.
– **Free trial:** 7 days for new users.
– **Free forever plan:** a very limited audit.
Honestly, $139.95/month is steep if all you want is the audit. If keyword research and rank tracking are already part of your stack, though, it rides along for free.
## Where It Frustrates Me
An honest list, because no tool is clean:
– **Crawl limits bite on big sites.** Past roughly 100k pages you’ll be segmenting by folder and running multiple audits. Annoying, but manageable.
– **JavaScript rendering slows everything down.** Flip it on and expect noticeably longer crawls.
– **Notices are mostly noise.** Hundreds of low-priority flags can bury the five issues that actually matter. You’ll need discipline to ignore them.
– **It won’t explain off-page drops.** If your leak comes from lost backlinks or an algorithm update, this report stays silent. Pair it with Search Console or the rest of the Semrush suite.
The robots.txt trap belongs here too. A perfect-looking score from a blocked crawler is worse than no score at all.
## Who Should Use It (and Who Shouldn’t)
Buy it if:
– You run an agency or freelance for clients and need reports people actually read.
– You manage a content site or online store with hundreds of pages or more.
– You want scheduled monitoring instead of a one-off check.
Skip it if:
– Your site is five static pages. Google Search Console and PageSpeed Insights cover you for free.
– You only care about backlinks and keywords, and another tool already handles those.
To be frank, a small brochure site doesn’t need 140 technical checks. Don’t buy a microscope when a flashlight will do.
## My Verdict
4.5 out of 5. Site Audit has caught problems on my sites that I’d have missed for months, and it does so fast. It has quirks, the price assumes you’ll use more of the suite than just this one report, and the notices tab needs a noise filter. For anyone maintaining a site with real page counts, though, it’s the first tool I’d add after Search Console.
Traffic leaks are fixable. You just need something that finds them. This report does exactly that.