12 min read · Technical SEO · Last updated July 2026
Quick answer: Ahrefs Site Audit crawls your site and assigns a Health Score (0–100) based on weighted issue severity. Errors kill rankings; Warnings slow you down; Notices are informational. Focus on Errors first, then Warnings affecting high-traffic pages.
Introduction
Here is a number that should change how you think about site audits: 46% of websites have at least one critical crawlability error that prevents Google from properly indexing their most important pages. Yet most teams spend their audit time fixing meta description lengths.
Ahrefs Site Audit is the closest thing technical SEOs have to seeing what Googlebot sees when it hits your domain. It surfaces real crawl data — broken links, redirect chains, duplicate content, slow pages, orphaned URLs — inside a single dashboard. But raw data without a decision framework just creates noise.
This guide walks you through every layer of an Ahrefs Site Audit:
- How to configure a crawl that actually reflects real-world bot behavior
- What each Health Score band means and when to panic
- How to decode every major issue category with real fix examples
- A priority matrix for shipping fixes in the right order
Table of Contents
- Setting Up Your First Ahrefs Site Audit
- Understanding the Health Score
- Errors: The Issues That Block Rankings
- Warnings: The Issues That Limit Rankings
- Notices: What You Can (Mostly) Ignore
- The Issue Priority Matrix
- Crawl Configuration Tips That Change Everything
- Integrating Site Audit Into Your Monthly Workflow
- FAQ
- Conclusion
1. Setting Up Your First Ahrefs Site Audit
Before you run a crawl, your configuration determines whether the data is useful or misleading.
Step 1 — Create a new project. In Ahrefs, go to Site Audit → New Project. Enter your root domain without trailing slashes. If your site runs on both www and non-www, pick whichever version Google Search Console confirms as your canonical.
Step 2 — Set crawl scope. By default, Ahrefs crawls all subdomains it discovers. For most audits, scope to the primary domain only. If you run a blog on blog.yourdomain.com with separate content strategy, audit it independently.
Step 3 — Configure crawl speed. The default is 1 request per second. For sites under 10,000 pages, increase to 3–5 req/sec to finish faster. For large e-commerce sites on shared hosting, stay conservative. An overwhelmed server produces misleading 5xx errors.
Step 4 — Crawl source. Choose whether Ahrefs crawls only pages it discovers from your sitemap, from internal links, or both. Always use “All” — sitemap-only crawls miss orphaned pages that Googlebot still finds via backlinks.
Step 5 — Set up scheduling. Weekly crawls catch regressions before they compound. Daily crawls are worth it for sites publishing 20+ pages per week.
Step 6 — Connect to Google Search Console. This unlocks one of Site Audit’s most underrated features: comparing crawled URLs against what GSC has indexed. Pages Ahrefs finds but GSC hasn’t indexed are your first investigation target.
Key takeaway: Crawl configuration is half the audit. Garbage-in, garbage-out — a misconfigured crawl produces a false health score.
2. Understanding the Health Score
The Health Score is a weighted percentage of crawled URLs that have no errors. It is not a percentage of total pages — it weights each issue by severity and by how many pages it affects.
| Score Range | Interpretation | Typical Cause |
|---|---|---|
| 90–100 | Excellent | Minor notices only |
| 75–89 | Good | Scattered warnings; a few errors |
| 60–74 | Fair | Systemic warnings; multiple error types |
| 40–59 | Poor | Widespread errors; likely ranking drag |
| Below 40 | Critical | Fundamental crawlability problems |
Why the Health Score is misleading on its own:
A site with 50,000 pages and 200 broken internal links might score 97. A 500-page site with 30 canonical errors on its top product pages might score 85. The second site has the bigger ranking problem despite the higher score.
Always filter issues by traffic-bearing pages before declaring a health score “good enough.” Export your top 100 GSC pages and cross-reference them against Site Audit issues — that is your real health score for what matters.
3. Errors: The Issues That Block Rankings
Ahrefs defines Errors as issues severe enough to directly harm crawlability, indexability, or ranking potential. Fix these before anything else.
Broken Internal Links (4xx)
Internal links pointing to pages that return 4xx responses waste crawl budget and pass zero PageRank to the destination. A page receiving 50 broken internal links is, from Google’s perspective, a dead end in your site architecture.
Fix: Run the Broken Links report filtered to Internal. Export, then pipe through your CMS’s redirect manager or fix the link URLs directly. Priority order: fix links from pages with the highest Internal Link Rank first.
Pages Returning 5xx Errors
Server errors during a crawl tell Ahrefs — and Googlebot — that the page is temporarily or permanently unavailable. If a 5xx appears on multiple crawls, Google drops the page from its index.
Common cause at scale: e-commerce sites that hit database query limits during bot traffic spikes. Solution: cache product pages aggressively and whitelist Googlebot in your rate limiter.
Redirect Chains and Redirect Loops
A redirect chain is A → B → C → D (destination). Every additional hop costs crawl budget and dilutes link equity. Ahrefs flags chains of 3+ hops. Redirect loops (A → B → A) prevent crawling entirely.
Fix: Flatten all chains to a single 301 from source directly to final destination. Use Screaming Frog’s redirect chain report alongside Ahrefs to bulk-fix these in your .htaccess or Nginx config.
Duplicate Pages Without Canonical
When multiple URLs serve identical or near-identical content without a canonical tag telling Google which to index, Google makes the choice itself — and it frequently picks the wrong one. Faceted navigation is the biggest culprit: /shoes?color=black&size=10 and /shoes?size=10&color=black are the same page to humans but two URLs to bots.
Fix: Implement canonical tags pointing to the preferred URL. For parameter-driven duplicates, use the <link rel="canonical"> tag rather than relying on Google Search Console’s URL Parameters tool (which Google retired).
Broken Canonical Tags
A canonical pointing to a non-existent URL is worse than no canonical. Ahrefs flags these as errors. Audit after every site migration — stale canonicals from the old URL structure are the most common source.
Key takeaway: Errors are binary — they either block ranking or they don’t. Fix every error on pages generating organic traffic within the current sprint.
4. Warnings: The Issues That Limit Rankings
Warnings do not block Googlebot but they cap how well pages can rank. They represent accumulated technical debt.
Missing or Duplicate Title Tags
Title tags remain one of Google’s strongest on-page ranking signals. Pages with duplicate titles compete against each other in the same index. Pages with missing titles get auto-generated titles by Google — which are often terrible.
The hidden duplicate problem: Template-driven CMSes often generate identical title tags for paginated pages (/category/shoes/page/2 gets the same title as /category/shoes). Ahrefs surfaces these. Fix with dynamic title templates that append page numbers.
Low Word Count Pages
Ahrefs flags pages under ~200 words. The algorithm behind this is crude — word count alone does not determine quality — but pages with very low content often signal thin content that Google discounts. Investigate each flagged URL: is it a legitimate landing page, a navigation page, or genuinely thin content?
Slow Page Load Speed
Ahrefs pulls Time to First Byte (TTFB) data during crawls. Pages above 3 seconds TTFB are flagged as warnings. TTFB above 600ms consistently correlates with lower crawl rates from Googlebot in log file analysis.
Images Without Alt Text
Alt text is both an accessibility requirement and an image ranking signal. Missing alt text is a systematic warning on most image-heavy sites. Prioritize fixing alt text on product images (e-commerce) and blog post featured images first.
Multiple H1 Tags
One H1 per page is standard. Multiple H1s confuse content hierarchy signals. This is common when themes inject their own H1 alongside a CMS-generated one — audit your theme templates, not just individual pages.
5. Notices: What You Can (Mostly) Ignore
Notices are informational — Ahrefs flags them for awareness, not urgency.
External broken links: Your site links to an external page that now 404s. Poor user experience, but no direct ranking impact. Fix these in a quarterly pass.
Long URLs: URLs above 115 characters are flagged. Long URLs are ugly but Google has confirmed URL length is not a ranking factor. Fix only if you are restructuring site architecture anyway.
Non-descriptive anchor text: Links using “click here” or “read more.” Fix these when editing content, not as a standalone task.
Orphaned pages in sitemap: Pages in your XML sitemap that have zero internal links pointing to them. These receive crawl budget through the sitemap but no PageRank through the link graph. Worth reviewing but not an emergency.
6. Interactive Issue Priority Matrix
Use this widget to score and prioritize your Site Audit findings:
7. Crawl Configuration Tips That Change Everything
Respect robots.txt — but also audit it. Ahrefs respects your robots.txt by default. If you have accidentally blocked important URL patterns, the audit will miss those pages. Always audit your robots.txt first: fetch yourdomain.com/robots.txt and check for overly broad Disallow rules.
JavaScript rendering matters. Ahrefs offers JavaScript rendering in crawl settings. Without it, dynamically rendered content (React, Vue, Angular SPAs) shows as empty pages. Enable JS rendering for modern web apps — accept that crawl time will increase 3–5x.
URL parameters. Define which parameters Ahrefs should treat as distinct pages vs. URL variants. Without this, session IDs and tracking parameters create thousands of duplicate pages in your audit report.
Crawl comparison. Run crawls weekly and use the Compare Crawls feature. A drop in Health Score between Tuesday and Wednesday tells you a deployment broke something — before Google notices.
8. Ahrefs Site Audit Health Score Simulator
9. Integrating Site Audit Into Your Monthly Workflow
A one-time audit is a snapshot. A monthly workflow turns Site Audit into a monitoring system.
Week 1: Run full crawl, export all Errors, filter to pages with GSC impressions > 0. This is your P1 fix list.
Week 2: Fix P1 items, verify fixes by re-crawling individual URLs (Ahrefs allows single-URL recrawls). Log fixes in a shared sheet with before/after status codes.
Week 3: Address Warnings on your top 50 organic traffic pages. Duplicate titles, slow TTFB, missing alt text.
Week 4: Review crawl comparison vs. previous month. Catch regressions. Update the audit log. Brief stakeholders on Health Score trend.
The goal is a Health Score that trends upward month-over-month, with errors eliminated first and warnings declining systematically.
FAQ
Q: Why does my Ahrefs Health Score differ from Screaming Frog’s results?
Both tools crawl your site but make different assumptions about redirect following, JavaScript rendering, and crawl order. Use Ahrefs as your primary tracker and Screaming Frog for deep-dive investigations on specific issues.
Q: How often should I run an Ahrefs Site Audit?
Weekly for active sites publishing regularly or running paid campaigns. Monthly is acceptable for smaller brochure sites. Always run a crawl immediately after a major deployment.
Q: My health score is 95 but I still can’t rank. Why?
Health Score measures technical hygiene, not content quality, E-E-A-T, or backlink profile. A technically perfect site with thin content and no authority will not rank. Technical SEO is necessary but not sufficient.
Q: Can I exclude subdomains from the audit?
Yes. In Project Settings → Crawl Settings, uncheck “Include subdomains.” Each subdomain is best audited as a separate project.
Q: Should I fix all Errors before touching Warnings?
Fix Errors on high-traffic pages first, then Warnings on high-traffic pages. A Warning on a page generating 10,000 monthly sessions is more urgent than an Error on an orphaned page with zero traffic.
Q: How do I share Site Audit reports with clients?
Ahrefs allows PDF export of any report view. For recurring reporting, build a Google Data Studio (Looker Studio) connector using Ahrefs API data so clients see a live dashboard.
Conclusion
A well-executed Ahrefs Site Audit gives you the clearest technical picture of what is holding your site back in search. The Health Score is your compass, but the real work is in the issue categories — triaging Errors from Warnings, filtering to pages that actually matter, and shipping fixes in priority order.
The teams that pull ahead in organic search do not run one audit per year. They run weekly crawls, monitor Health Score trends, and treat technical regressions the same way engineering teams treat failed tests: fix them before the next release.
If you need help interpreting your Ahrefs audit or building a fix roadmap, Ignited Nepal’s technical SEO team works with clients across Nepal, Australia, UAE, and beyond to turn crawl data into ranking gains.
Written by the Ignited Nepal team. ignitednepal.com