A website audit with AI is a Workflow job: you run three free checks, hand the AI the results with your page list and page text, and get back one ranked list of fixes. Plan an afternoon for a site of up to about thirty pages. The audit looks at four things: speed, clarity, broken links and missing pages. The AI does the sorting and the explaining. You fix the top five, and the rest wait for the next run.
- Shape
- Workflow
- Sitting
- an afternoon
The shape: Workflow
It is a Workflow because each step is checked before the next one starts: free tools test the site, the AI ranks what they found, and you check each top row on your phone before you fix anything. Run the checks, gather the pages, paste the brief, judge the list, fix five, write down the date. The order matters. An AI asked to "audit my website" with nothing attached will write a generic checklist that fits every website and helps none. An AI handed real test results and your real page text writes a list about your site.
The honest limit is the crawl. Some chat tools can open a link and read a few pages, but they do not reliably walk every page of a site, and they cannot time how long your home page takes to load on a phone. So the crawling is done by free tools built for it, and the AI does the part those tools are bad at: turning forty technical warnings into five plain sentences ranked by what they cost you.
What that means for you: most of the afternoon is collecting and fixing, not chatting. Once you have run it once, the second run takes about half the time, because you know where every input comes from.
What you give the AI
Gather these before you open the chat. Each one is a file, a screenshot or a paste.
- A speed report for your two most important pages. Run your home page and your main service page through PageSpeed Insights on the mobile setting. Copy the scores and the list under Diagnostics, or take a screenshot of each.
- A broken link list. Run your site through the W3C Link Checker with the box "Check linked documents recursively" ticked (it checks up to 150 pages), or open the Pages report in Google Search Console and copy the URLs listed as not found.
- Your page list. Every page URL on the site. Your sitemap, usually at yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml, gives you this in one paste.
- The text of your three main pages. Copy and paste the visible words of your home page, your top service page and your contact or booking page. Paste the words, not the link, so the AI reads exactly what a visitor sees.
- What you sell. Every service or product by the name you use with customers, one per line. This is how the AI spots a service with no page of its own.
- The five questions customers ask before they book. Take them from your phone calls and emails, in the customer's words. The AI checks whether your site answers each one, and where.
- Your contact facts as they should read. Business name, phone number, address or service area, and hours, exactly as they appear on your Google Business Profile. Mismatched phone numbers and old hours are easy for you to miss and easy for an audit to catch.
What comes back
You get back one ranked table of fixes, a short note on each, and a plain list of what you can ignore for now. Each row names the problem, the page it is on, why it costs you customers, the fix in one sentence, and who can make it.
Paste this brief, then paste or attach your inputs under it.
You are auditing a small business website.
Attached: a mobile speed report for two pages, a broken link list, our full page list, the text of our three main pages, our list of services, the five questions customers ask before booking, and our correct contact details.
Check four areas.
1. Speed: from the speed report only, name the two or three causes that slow the pages most, in plain words.
2. Clarity: read each main page as a stranger on a phone.
Can they tell in five seconds what we do, where we do it, and how to book?
Quote the sentence that fails, if one does.
3. Broken links and dead pages: list each broken link, the page it sits on, and where it should point instead.
4. Missing pages: compare our services list and the five customer questions with our page list.
Name any service with no page and any question no page answers.
Also check every page text for contact details that differ from our correct contact details.
Then rank every finding by how likely it is to cost us a customer, worst first.
Return a table: rank, area, problem, page, why it matters, the fix in one sentence, and whether we can fix it in our site editor or need our web person or host.
Below the table, list what you would leave alone for now and why.
Rules:
Use only what is in the attachments.
Do not guess at problems you cannot see.
Do not invent traffic, conversion or speed numbers.
If a finding needs a test you were not given, say which test.Expect the first pass to be mostly right on broken links and contact mismatches, which are plain facts, and less reliable on speed, which depends on how well it reads the report. If a row is vague, ask for it again with the exact page and the exact sentence.
How to judge it
You can reject a bad audit in about a minute once you know what bad looks like.
A bad audit:
- Reads like it would fit any website. "Improve your user experience" and "add more calls to action" with no page named are filler.
- Ranks a technical warning above a missing phone number. A customer who cannot find how to reach you is lost; a minor script warning costs far less.
- Contains a number you did not give it, such as a bounce rate, a percentage of visitors lost, or a load time that is not in your speed report. Delete these on sight.
- Recommends a full redesign. An audit lists fixes; a redesign is a different decision, made for different reasons.
- Names a problem on a page that is not in your page list. That usually means it guessed instead of reading.
- Tells you to add keywords to every heading. Clarity for a stranger comes first, and stuffed headings read worse to people.
A good audit names a page and a sentence for every row, and every fix fits in one line. The test that catches most problems: for each of the top five rows, open the page on your phone and look for the problem yourself. If you can see it, it is real. If you cannot find it in a minute, push the row down the list.
What stays with you
Some of this job no AI can do for you.
The facts. The AI can see that your hours differ between two pages, but only you know which one is true. Every fix that changes a claim on your site is a claim you are making in public, so check it before it goes live.
The ranking call. The AI ranks by likely cost, but you know your customers. If most of your bookings come by phone, a buried phone number outranks a slow image. If most come through a form, the form page comes first. Reorder the top five by what you know.
The fixing. The AI cannot log into your site builder. You make each change, save it, and check the live page on your phone. Hand anything marked for your web person or host to them the same day, with the exact row from the table.
What to add. When the audit finds a service with no page, the AI can draft the page, but you supply what makes it yours: the real process, the real service area, the photos of real work. Our note on service pages AI tools can read covers what a good one holds.
The date. Write down what you fixed and when. The next run starts from that note, not from scratch.
An example, made up for this page
Say you run a two-van carpet cleaning business with a site of fourteen pages. You run the checks, paste the brief and get back a table of twenty-two rows. The top row: your phone number on the contact page has an old area code, and it differs from your Google Business Profile. Second: your home page opens with a slogan about clean living, and the words "carpet cleaning" and your town do not appear until the third paragraph. Third: you sell tile and grout cleaning, but there is no page for it, and a customer question about pet stains is answered nowhere. Fourth: two links in the footer point to a pricing page you deleted last year. Fifth: the before-and-after photos on the home page are full-size camera files, which the speed report lists as the largest items on the page. You fix four of the five that afternoon in the site editor and draft the tile page for the next day. The other seventeen rows wait for next quarter.
None of that is a real business or a real result. It shows the size and shape of the afternoon, not what it will produce.
Who fixes what
Most rows land in one of three places. Sort the table by this column before you start, so you know what you can finish today.
| What the audit found | Who usually fixes it |
|---|---|
| Unclear opening line, old contact details, missing answer to a customer question | You, in the site editor |
| Broken links, deleted pages still linked, a missing service page | You, in the site editor |
| Oversized images | You, by resizing before you upload again |
| Slow server, heavy theme, scripts from plugins | Your web person or your host's support team |
| A site builder that cannot do what a fix needs | A bigger decision; park it and keep fixing the rest |
For image sizes, our guide to compressing images walks through the same steps that work for website photos. And for the reason clarity sits so high on the list, see what customers check before calling.
Keep it running
Run the same workflow once a quarter, and again after any redesign or any change to what you sell. Reuse the brief as it is, add last run's dated note as one more attachment, and ask the AI to flag anything that came back. A problem that returns is usually a sign of how the site gets edited, which is worth fixing at the source.
Of every job on this list, social media is the one that comes back every week, and Boomp is software that does that one for you. See ten posts made from your website, free
