Ahrefs Site Audit is a crawl-based report that shows technical and on-page problems affecting the URLs it can access. This guide was prepared on. Ahrefs checks for more than 170 predefined technical and on-page issues, although the exact list depends on the project settings.
Read Ahrefs Site Audit in this order:
- Confirm that the crawl has finished and covered the right pages.
- Use Health Score as a diagnostic indicator, not an SEO grade.
- Review Errors before Warnings and Notices.
- Open each issue and inspect the affected URLs, status codes, indexability, and internal links.
- Prioritize issues by business and SEO impact, not by URL count alone.
- Fix the underlying problem, rerun the crawl, and compare the results with the previous crawl.
The useful part of Site Audit is the URL-level detail. You need to know which pages are affected, why they are affected, and whether those pages matter to search performance or users.
Ahrefs Site Audit at a Glance
| Site Audit Element | What It Tells You | How to Use It |
|---|---|---|
| Health Score | The proportion of crawled internal URLs without Error-level issues | Track technical health over time |
| Errors | The most serious configured issues | Investigate these first |
| Warnings | Problems that may affect crawling, indexing, usability, or on-page SEO | Review after Errors |
| Notices | Lower-priority recommendations or observations | Address when they have clear value |
| Page Explorer | Page-level SEO, technical, performance, and indexing data | Filter and inspect individual URLs |
| Link Explorer | Internal link and outgoing link data | Find broken, redirected, or poorly linked pages |
| Crawl Comparison | Changes between audits | Confirm whether fixes worked |
Is the Ahrefs Crawl Complete?
Confirm that the crawl has finished before interpreting the report. Ahrefs warns that reports can be incomplete or inaccurate while a crawl is still running.
Check the following:
- The crawl status says Finished.
- The number of crawled pages looks reasonable.
- Ahrefs crawled the correct protocol, such as HTTPS.
- The correct subfolders, subdomains, and domains were included.
- Important pages were discovered through the site, XML sitemap, or backlinks.
- No crawler access problems reduced the coverage.
A crawl of 50 pages does not tell you much about a 5,000-page website. A high Health Score can be misleading when the crawl covered only a small part of the site.
Use the Source column to see whether Ahrefs found a URL through the website, an XML sitemap, or backlinks. This can explain why an old, deleted, or unfamiliar URL appears in the report.
What Does Health Score Mean?
Health Score shows the percentage of crawled internal URLs without Error-level issues. Ahrefs calculates it as:
Health Score = internal URLs without Errors ÷ total crawled internal URLs × 100
Ahrefs rates the score as follows:
| Health Score | Ahrefs Rating |
|---|---|
| 0 to 30 | Weak |
| 31 to 70 | Fair |
| 71 to 90 | Good |
| 91 to 100 | Excellent |
Only Errors reduce the Health Score. Warnings and Notices do not.
Health Score does not measure:
- Google rankings
- Organic traffic
- Conversions
- Backlink quality
- Content usefulness
- Revenue
- Brand visibility
A site can have a Health Score of 100 and still contain weak content, poor internal linking, unresolved Warnings, or important pages that receive little traffic. Use the score to track technical changes across comparable crawls, not as a ranking score.
Check the project settings as well. Disabling or reclassifying an Error can raise the Health Score without fixing the affected pages.
Should You Review Errors Before Warnings?
Yes, review Errors first, then Warnings and Notices. Severity provides a useful starting point, but it should not override page value.
Ahrefs groups issues into three levels:
- Errors: Problems that usually need the fastest investigation.
- Warnings: Problems that may affect crawling, indexing, usability, or on-page SEO.
- Notices: Lower-priority observations or recommendations.
A Warning affecting an important revenue page may deserve more attention than an Error affecting an obsolete URL.
A practical priority order is:
- Pages that should be indexed but cannot be crawled or indexed
- Broken pages and broken internal links
- Redirects that interrupt important internal paths
- Canonical, hreflang, or duplicate-content problems
- Serious performance or rendering problems
- Titles, meta descriptions, headings, image, and structured data issues
- Low-impact Notices
The number of affected URLs is only one factor. One broken product page may matter more than hundreds of missing image alt attributes on low-value pages.
How Do You Inspect an Ahrefs Issue?
Open the issue and inspect the affected URLs. Do not stop at the issue name or the total URL count.
For each important URL, review:
- HTTP status code
- Indexability
- Canonical URL
- Robots directives
- Sitemap inclusion
- Internal link count and link type
- Referring pages
- Organic traffic
- Page Rating
- Page title, meta description, and H1
- Rendered HTML where relevant
- Whether the URL is valuable or intentionally excluded
Page Explorer and Link Explorer support preset and advanced filters. You can combine rules, compare current and previous crawls, and filter URLs by status code, indexability, links, traffic, and page type.
How Should You Investigate an Unexpected URL?
Start with the URL's source and link data. Check:
- Source
- Inlinks
- Sitemap status
- URL type
- Referring page
- Anchor text
Ahrefs can show the page and anchor text that led it to an unexpected URL. This often exposes an old internal link, a sitemap entry, or a backlink that caused the URL to be discovered.
How Should You Read Common Site Audit Issues?
Read every issue in the context of the affected page. The right fix depends on the URL's purpose, links, traffic, and place in the site structure.
404 Pages
A 404 means the requested URL does not exist. The right response depends on what the URL used to contain:
- Replace internal links with a relevant live URL.
- Add a redirect when there is a suitable replacement.
- Keep the 404 when the page was intentionally removed and has no relevant replacement.
- Remove obsolete URLs from XML sitemaps.
Pay closer attention to 404 pages that receive internal links or backlinks. They create poor user paths and waste internal linking opportunities.
Broken Redirects
A broken redirect sends a URL to a 4XX or 5XX destination. Check both the redirecting URL and the destination, then replace internal links to the redirecting URL with direct links to the final live page where possible.
/page-old -> /page-new -> 404
Keeping the first redirect does not solve the problem. The destination must return a valid response, or the original link should point to a relevant live page.
Redirect Chains
A redirect chain contains multiple redirects before the final destination:
/page-a -> /page-b -> /page-c
Update internal links so they point directly to /page-c when that is the intended destination. Ahrefs reports redirect chains under the Redirects section of Site Audit.
Orphan Pages
An orphan page has no internal links pointing to it. First decide whether the page should remain on the site.
- If the page matters, add relevant internal links.
- If it is useful but intentionally outside the main navigation, make sure users and search engines can still discover it.
- If it is obsolete, remove it, redirect it, or keep it out of the index as appropriate.
Do not add links to every orphan page automatically. Temporary campaign pages and private utility URLs may be intentionally isolated.
Duplicate Pages
Ahrefs separates duplicate pages into good duplicates and bad duplicates. Duplicate or similar pages can be acceptable when canonical, hreflang, or pagination signals clearly describe the relationship. The problem is greater when those signals are missing, inconsistent, or contradictory.
Ask these questions:
- Are the pages genuinely different?
- Should both pages appear in search results?
- Which URL is the preferred version?
- Are canonical tags consistent?
- Are language or regional variants using hreflang correctly?
- Are internal links pointing to the preferred URLs?
Missing or Weak Titles, Descriptions, and Headings
Prioritize on-page issues by page value. Start with:
- Pages that receive organic traffic
- Pages targeting valuable keywords
- Product and service pages
- Category and landing pages
- Pages with strong internal or external links
A missing title on a core service page deserves attention. The same issue on an unindexed utility page usually does not.
Structured Data Issues
Open the issue report or URL details panel to see which structured data properties are invalid or missing. Ahrefs checks structured data against Schema.org rules and relevant Google requirements. Inspect the page source as well to confirm that the markup exists as expected.
Do not add structured data only to remove warnings. The markup should accurately describe content that is visible on the page.
Performance and Core Web Vitals
When PageSpeed Insights data is enabled, Ahrefs can show Lighthouse metrics and Chrome User Experience Report data in Page Explorer and the Performance report. Available data varies by page, device type, and the amount of field data available.
Look for patterns:
- Are slow pages concentrated in one template?
- Are mobile pages slower than desktop pages?
- Do large images affect product or article templates?
- Do poorly performing pages also lose traffic or conversions?
Do not improve an isolated score without checking the page experience and business impact.
What Is Page Rating Used For?
Page Rating measures the strength of a URL's internal and external backlink profile on a logarithmic scale from 1 to 100. It is not a content-quality score or a ranking guarantee.
Use Page Rating as one part of issue prioritization:
- A broken or poorly linked page with a high Page Rating may need urgent attention.
- A low-value page with few links may be lower priority.
- A valuable page with a low Page Rating may need stronger internal links.
Combine Page Rating with organic traffic, conversions, page type, and indexability before deciding what to fix.
How Do You Compare Ahrefs Crawls?
Compare the current crawl with the previous crawl after making changes. The comparison shows whether issues were resolved and whether the implementation introduced new problems.
Review:
- New issues
- Resolved issues
- URLs that remain affected
- Newly discovered URLs
- Changes in organic traffic
- Changes in titles, content, indexability, and sitemap status
Ahrefs lets you compare selected crawls and identify issues that increased, decreased, appeared, or disappeared. It can also show URL-level changes in HTML, rendered content, organic traffic, and SERP titles.
| Result After the Fix | What It Means |
|---|---|
| Issue count falls and affected URLs disappear | The fix probably worked |
| Issue count falls but important URLs remain | The fix was incomplete |
| Health Score rises after disabling an issue | The report changed, but the problem may remain |
| New issues appear after a redesign | The change may have introduced technical problems |
| The score stays similar but critical pages improve | The business result may still be positive |
The Key Rule for Reading Ahrefs Site Audit
Do not ask, "How do I get a perfect score?" Ask, "Which technical problems are preventing important pages from being crawled, indexed, discovered, or used effectively?"
Health Score tracks change. Issue reports explain the problem. URL-level data tells you where to act. Crawl comparisons show whether the fix held.