Free SEO Audit Template for 2026: 87 Checks Across 5 Tabs (Excel + Sheets)

An SEO audit template is only useful if it does three things.

• It tells you what to check. The full inventory, not a greatest-hits list.
• It tells you why each check matters. Without that, you cannot prioritize honestly.
• It turns findings into a score. A number someone can act on.

Most free templates do the first, skip the second, and leave the third to you.

The CrawlRaven SEO Audit Template does all three. It also adds a fifth audit dimension that, as of July 2026, I have not found in any competing free template.

That dimension is a dedicated AI Visibility tab. It audits whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google's AI Overviews can crawl, read, and cite your site.

• Prefer working in the browser? This template pairs with our interactive SEO audit checklist.
• Presenting to a client? Use the SEO audit report template when it is time to show findings to a stakeholder.
• Want the rest of our free downloads? They all live on the SEO templates page.

What's inside the CrawlRaven SEO Audit Template

The workbook has seven tabs: a How to Use tab with the severity and status legend, five audit tabs holding the 87 checks, and a Summary scorecard.

Every check row follows the same five-column structure.

1. The check itself. Written as something you can verify, not a topic to think about.
2. Why it matters. A one-line explanation so you can prioritize honestly.
3. Severity. Pre-set and overridable: Critical, High, Medium, or Low.
4. Status. A Pass/Fail/N-A dropdown.
5. Notes. The evidence: affected URLs, the tool you used to verify, and who owns the fix.

Technical SEO tab: 30 checks on crawling, indexing, and performance

The biggest tab, because technical failures have the highest blast radius. The 30 checks fall into four groups.

• Crawling and indexing. Canonical host resolution, HTTPS, robots.txt, sitemap hygiene, noindex leaks, canonical tags, and index coverage.
• Structure and errors. 4xx/5xx errors, redirect chains, orphan pages, crawl depth, duplicate content and parameter handling, faceted navigation, and pagination.
• Performance and rendering. All three Core Web Vitals (LCP under 2.5s, INP under 200ms, CLS under 0.1), mobile-friendliness, and server-side rendering.
• Markup. Structured data validity and hreflang.

Eight of the thirty default to Critical severity. These are the checks that can keep a site out of the index entirely, which is why the fix order always starts here.

Want the full reasoning behind each check? Our technical SEO audit checklist walks through every one in depth.

On-Page tab: 20 checks on titles, headings, and internal links

On-page issues rarely deindex a site, but they quietly cap how far it can rank. The 20 checks split three ways.

• Metadata and headings. Title tag uniqueness and length, meta descriptions, H1 and heading hierarchy, URL slugs, and keyword placement in the first 100 words.
• Intent and overlap. Search-intent match and keyword cannibalization.
• Supporting elements. Image alt text, internal link coverage and anchor text, breadcrumbs, schema on eligible templates, social cards, and interstitials.

Two checks default to Critical: intent match and unique titles.

Why those two? No amount of optimization rescues a page that answers the wrong question, and duplicate titles make your own pages compete with each other.

Content tab: 15 checks on quality, freshness, and E-E-A-T

This tab forces the uncomfortable inventory work most audits skip.

• Inventory. A full content inventory and a keyword-to-URL map.
• Triage. Thin-page triage, refresh-or-prune decisions on outdated posts, and content decay detection.
• Consolidation. Topic cluster mapping and near-duplicate merging.
• E-E-A-T. Author credentials on expert content, evidence of first-hand experience, truthful dates, and a helpful-content self-assessment.

The lone Critical default is mass-produced filler content. Scaled low-value content is the one content issue that triggers sitewide classifier demotions rather than page-level underperformance.

Links tab: 10 checks on backlink health and internal equity

Deliberately the smallest tab, because most sites overweight link analysis relative to what they can act on.

• Profile health. Referring-domain trends and anchor text distribution.
• Risk. Toxic-link risk (with the note that you should only disavow under a manual action) and paid-link disclosure.
• Recovery. Lost-link reclamation, competitor link gaps, and unlinked brand mentions.
• Equity flow. Broken outbound links and internal equity flow from your most-linked pages.
• Assets. Whether you have at least one genuinely linkable asset.

The Critical default is undisclosed paid links, the only link issue on the list that risks a manual action rather than mere underperformance.

AI Visibility tab: 12 checks no other template has

The differentiator. Twelve checks that audit your site the way an AI answer engine encounters it.

• Access. A deliberate robots.txt decision for each AI crawler (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended), plus CDN/WAF rules that silently 403 those same bots.
• Rendering. Server-side rendering of key content, and an llms.txt file.
• Structure. Answer-first content structure, question-form headings, and quotable self-contained sentences.
• Markup. FAQ/HowTo/Article schema.
• Proof. Citation testing in ChatGPT and Perplexity and AI Overviews, plus AI referral segmentation in analytics.
• Signals. Entity consistency across the web and content freshness.

Three of the twelve default to Critical. There is a full section on why this tab exists below.

Summary tab: the auto-scoring scorecard

The Summary tab is pure formulas. You never type in it.

For each audit area it counts Pass, Fail, N-A, and unchecked rows, then computes Critical fails, High fails, and a pass rate that excludes N-A checks. A totals row rolls the whole audit up into a single verdict cell.

• Healthy. A 90%+ pass rate with zero Critical fails.
• Needs work. A pass rate of 70–89%.
• At risk. Below 70%, or any Critical fail still open.

Everything runs on COUNTIF, COUNTIFS, SUM, and IF. No add-ins, no scripts. It behaves identically in Excel, Google Sheets, and LibreOffice.

How severity triage works

Severity is what turns 87 findings into a fix queue instead of a guilt list. Every check ships with a pre-set level, and the levels have teeth.

• Critical. The site may not be indexable at all.
• High. You are losing traffic every week the issue stays open.
• Medium. Batches into normal sprints.
• Low. Waits until you touch the page anyway.

The pre-sets are opinions, not laws. Downgrade hreflang on a single-language site; upgrade Core Web Vitals if you live and die by mobile conversion.

How to run an SEO audit with this template

The template is the recording layer. The audit itself is a sequence of verifications.

Here is the exact process I use, which takes 4–8 hours for a first pass on a site under 500 pages. For a deeper narrative version of the technical half, see our guide on how to perform a technical SEO audit.

1. Set up the workbook (10 minutes). Download the template, fill in the site, date, and auditor fields on the How to Use tab, and skim the severity legend so Critical/High/Medium/Low mean the same thing to everyone touching the file.
2. Gather your data sources (30 minutes). You need Google Search Console access, a crawl of the site (any crawler; free tiers are fine under 500 URLs), PageSpeed Insights or CrUX data for Core Web Vitals, and analytics access. Ninety percent of the checks are verified against one of these four.
3. Work the Technical SEO tab first (2–3 hours). Start with the eight Critical-severity checks: canonical host, HTTPS, robots.txt, noindex leaks, canonicals, 5xx errors, mobile-friendliness. A fail on any of them changes how you interpret everything else. Set each Status dropdown as you verify, and record the evidence in Notes: the affected URLs, the tool, the date.
4. Run the On-Page tab against your top pages (1 hour). Do not audit all pages by hand. Audit your money pages and your templates. If the product template has a title problem, every product page has it. Mark sitewide template issues as one Fail with the template named in Notes.
5. Complete the Content tab with a spreadsheet export (1 hour). Export pages with traffic from analytics, sort by decline, and the thin-content, decay, and refresh checks nearly answer themselves. The keyword-map check is the slowest the first time and the fastest every time after.
6. Verify the Links tab (30 minutes). Referring-domain trends and anchor distribution come from whatever backlink tool you have access to; internal equity checks come from your crawl. Mark N-A on anything your tooling cannot verify rather than guessing.
7. Audit the AI Visibility tab (45 minutes). Read your robots.txt and CDN bot rules, load key pages with JavaScript disabled, validate schema, then actually ask ChatGPT and Perplexity the five queries you most want to be cited for and record who gets cited instead. This last exercise is uncomfortable and extremely clarifying.
8. Read the Summary tab and build the fix queue (30 minutes). The scorecard has already counted your Critical and High fails per area. The queue is mechanical: every Critical fail this week, High fails over the next 2–4 weeks, Medium and Low batched into sprints. Copy the queue into your project tracker with owners and dates.
9. Fix, then re-verify. Do not trust the fix (ongoing). Flip a Fail to Pass only after you have re-verified it live, not when the ticket closes. Deployed fixes get reverted, cached, or half-shipped more often than anyone admits.
10. Schedule the next audit (5 minutes). Set the next-audit-due date on the How to Use tab: quarterly for a full pass, immediately after any migration or redesign for the Technical tab. Duplicate the file per audit so you build a scored history over time.

Why your SEO audit needs an AI Visibility tab in 2026

Every SEO audit template you can download today, including the ones from big-brand tool vendors, audits for exactly one consumer of your site: Google's classic crawler-and-ten-blue-links pipeline.

That was defensible in 2023. In 2026 it is a blind spot, because a meaningful and growing share of discovery now happens inside AI answers: ChatGPT with search, Perplexity, Claude, and Google's own AI Overviews and AI Mode.

Those systems have different technical requirements. A site can be flawless on the first four tabs of this template while being effectively invisible to all of them. Three failure modes show up constantly, and they map to the three Critical checks on the tab.

1. Access. Robots.txt files and CDN bot-protection rules written years ago block GPTBot or PerplexityBot, sometimes deliberately, more often by accident via a catch-all rule. The site owner has never once tested it.
2. Rendering. Most AI crawlers do not execute JavaScript, so a client-side-rendered site serves them an empty shell no matter how good the content is once hydrated.
3. Extractability. AI engines quote concise, self-contained answers. A page that buries its answer under 600 words of preamble loses the citation to a competitor who states it in the first two sentences.

The remaining nine checks audit the softer citation layer.

• Machine-readable signposts. An llms.txt file, question-form headings, and valid schema.
• Quotable copy. Stat sentences an engine can lift whole.
• Real-world proof. Whether your brand actually appears when you test your money queries in the engines.
• Measurement. Whether AI referral traffic is segmented in analytics.
• Consistency and recency. Entity consistency across the web, and freshness.

None of this is exotic. It is 45 minutes of work with a browser. But no other free template even asks the questions.

We cover the full discipline in our guide to LLM SEO, and the audit tab is deliberately the checklist version of that guide.

When a template is enough, and when you need an automated tool

Honest answer, since we sell the tool: a spreadsheet is genuinely the right choice more often than tool vendors admit. The template wins in three situations.

• One-off or quarterly work. The audit is an event, not a monitoring job.
• Sites under roughly 500 pages. Manual verification is still tractable at that size.
• When the person running it wants to learn. Manually verifying 87 checks once teaches you more about how sites break than a year of reading dashboards.

It also wins as the client-facing structure. Scored tabs with severities and notes are something a stakeholder can read without a login.

The template loses in three predictable places.

• Scale. Manually verifying redirect chains or orphan pages across 5,000 URLs is not diligence, it is punishment. A crawler does it in minutes.
• Frequency. A quarterly manual audit means a bad deploy in week 2 costs you up to eleven weeks of damage. Automated monitoring catches it in days.
• Recurrence. If you audit client sites monthly, the manual approach burns billable hours doing what software does for single-digit dollars.

That is the gap CrawlRaven is built for.

• Scale. It crawls the whole site, however many pages that is.
• Depth. 200-point technical audits, run automatically on a schedule.
• AI visibility. Tracked continuously instead of once a quarter.
• Client-ready output. The white-label PDF reports agencies send to clients, on the $99 tier.
• Price. Lifetime licenses from a one-time $49, with a free plan for 1 site and no credit card required.

The workflow most of our agency users settle on is exactly the hybrid you would expect. CrawlRaven collects the data continuously, and this template (plus the report template) remains the human layer of judgment, severity calls, and the fix queue.

Use the spreadsheet to think. Use the tool so you never have to collect the data by hand again.

SEO audit template FAQs

Using the template

• Is it really free? Yes. Enter your email once and the full 87-check workbook is yours, with no paid tier behind it.
• Does it work in Google Sheets? Yes. It uses only COUNTIF/COUNTIFS/SUM/IF formulas, so the scorecard recalculates identically in Excel, Google Sheets, and LibreOffice. Upload the .xlsx to Drive and open with Sheets.
• Can I customize it? Every severity is a dropdown you can override, N-A exists precisely so irrelevant checks do not distort your score, and rows inserted inside the existing ranges are picked up by the Summary formulas automatically.

What to audit

• How often? Full audit quarterly; Technical tab additionally after every migration, redesign, or CMS change. High-deploy-frequency sites should automate the technical portion.
• In what order? Technical first, always. A noindex leak makes every on-page finding irrelevant. Then On-Page on your templates and money pages, Content from an analytics export, Links, and AI Visibility last since it reuses evidence from the earlier tabs.
• What gets fixed first? Critical fails this week, High fails within 2–4 weeks, Medium and Low batched. The Summary tab counts these per area so the queue builds itself.

Tools

• Do I need paid tools? No. Search Console, PageSpeed Insights, a JS-disabled browser, a schema validator, and a free-tier crawler cover all 87 checks on a smaller site.
• When does a tool beat the template? Past ~500 pages, on monthly client work, or whenever the cost of finding a regression late exceeds a one-time $49, which for most commercial sites is immediately. The template stays useful either way as the scoring and reporting layer on top of automated data.