SEO audits have a reputation for being either expensive or mysterious. An agency charges you thousands for one, or a tool spits out a 200-point report you don't know how to read. Both leave you dependent on someone else to tell you what's wrong with your own site.
You can do most of it yourself, for free, with tools that already exist plus an AI to interpret the results. Here's the stack and how to use it.
Start free, because free is enough to start
There are better paid tools, and I'll be honest about that at the end. But the free stack covers most of what a small marketing team needs, and it's the right place to begin. You don't need a Semrush subscription to find out your title tags are a mess.
The free audit stack
Google Search Console. The foundation. It's free, it's straight from Google, and it tells you how your pages are actually performing in search, which ones are indexed, what's broken, and how you're showing up in AI Overviews now too. If you set up nothing else, set up this.
Ahrefs Webmaster Tools. Permanently free for site owners (not a trial). Verify your site and it crawls you against 100-plus technical issues, from duplicate content to slow pages, with plain instructions on how to fix each one. This is the closest thing to a free professional-grade site audit.
Screaming Frog. Free for sites under 500 pages, which covers most small business sites. It crawls your whole site and exports exactly what's there: every title, every meta description, every broken link. The export is where the AI step comes in.
PageSpeed Insights. Free, from Google, checks how fast your pages load and flags what's slowing them down. Speed affects both rankings and whether people stick around, so this one matters.
The AI step that ties it together
A practical workflow visual for the ideas in this article.
Here's where it gets genuinely easy. The free tools above give you data and crawl exports. The hard part used to be reading them. Now you hand the export to Claude or ChatGPT and ask it to interpret.
Export your crawl from Screaming Frog or Ahrefs, drop it into Claude, and ask: "Here's a crawl of my site. What are the biggest SEO problems, in plain English, ranked by how much they matter?" It reads the technical output and hands you back a prioritised, readable list. No SEO jargon to decode.
You can go further with skills. Corey Haines' marketing skills include an SEO audit skill that walks the AI through a proper audit framework, so it checks the things an SEO professional would rather than whatever comes to mind.
If you want that skill but the GitHub install steps look daunting, just copy the link, paste it into Claude or Claude Code, and ask it to install the skill for you. Let the AI handle the setup.
The AI-visibility check
Traditional SEO is about ranking on Google. There's now a second question: does ChatGPT or Perplexity mention you when someone asks about your area? Several free graders check this, like the AI SEO audit at robot-speed.com, which scores your page for both Google and AI visibility and hands back copy-paste fixes. Worth running once on your main pages.
The honest part about paid tools
The full versions of Ahrefs and Semrush do more than this stack, deeper keyword research, competitor tracking, ongoing monitoring. If SEO becomes a real channel for you, they're worth the money. But you don't need them to find and fix the obvious problems on your own site, and you shouldn't pay for them before you've used the free stack to learn what's actually wrong.
Run the free audit first. You'll fix more than you expect, and you'll know far better whether a paid tool is worth it.
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