SEO audit
An SEO audit is a check of a website for the problems that hold it back in search, from pages bots can't read to weak or missing content.
An SEO audit is a check of your website for the problems that stop it doing well in search. It looks at whether search engines can reach and read your pages, whether those pages are worth showing, and whether other sites point to them. At the end you have a list of fixes, ideally in order of how much each one matters.
Audits are worth doing after a redesign, a move to a new platform, or a drop in traffic nobody can explain. Many small problems are invisible until someone goes looking.
What an audit covers
Most audits have three parts. The technical part checks crawling and indexing: robots.txt, sitemaps, redirects, broken links, page speed, and pages kept out of search by mistake. The content part checks titles, headings, thin or duplicate pages, and whether each page answers what people search for. The links part looks at who links to you and whether anything about those links looks unnatural.
For example, an audit of Kestrel Roasters' site might find that the shop's product filters create thousands of near-identical pages, that the blog's old posts redirect in chains, and that the brewing guides have no headings at all. Three different problems, three different fixes.
Auditing for AI search
The same checks matter for AI platforms, with a few more. Do the AI bots' rules in robots.txt let them in? Does a page's main text show up in the HTML, or only after a script runs? Does the page open with a clear answer that a platform can quote?
An audit also can't tell you what the platforms say about you. For that, ask them the questions your customers ask and read the answers.
In AnswerOrbit
The Audit tab in Website reads your robots.txt every day and shows which AI bots may read your site. The Pages tab shows what a bot reads on each page next to what a person sees. And Page checks in Recommendations runs eight checks on a page for a prompt, such as a title and headings, a visible date and an opening that answers, and runs the same checks on up to five pages the platforms cite for comparison. See Website and AI traffic and Recommendations.