Website Audit Services: What They Cost and What You Get

A website audit costs anywhere from nothing to $8,600 a month, and the price mostly tells you who does the reading. Free tools read your site and hand you numbers: PageSpeed Insights, Search Console, Ahrefs Webmaster Tools with 5,000 crawl credits a month, Screaming Frog for the first 500 URLs. Paid tools do the same continuously for $29 to $549 a month. Agencies give away a "free audit" that is a sales conversation with a checklist attached, though a few, ours included, put a real person on it. Productized audits sit at $1,500 to $5,000 for a fixed scope in days: ours is $3,000 in three business days, and the audit we ran on our own site is published in full so you can judge the deliverable before paying for one. Above that, agency audits start at several thousand and, at WebFX, at $8,600 a month. Every price here was checked on the vendor's live page on 7 September 2026.

The five tiers, and what each one returns

Tier	What it costs	Who reads the site	What you get
Free tools	$0	Software	Numbers: speed scores, crawl errors, indexation, backlinks
Paid tools	$29 to $549 a month	Software, continuously	The same numbers, tracked, with alerts and history
Free agency audit	$0	Sometimes a person	A short list, and a pitch
Productized audit	$1,500 to $5,000, fixed	One senior, in days	A ranked roadmap with what not to do
Agency audit	From several thousand to $8,600 a month	A team, over weeks	A long report, usually attached to a retainer

The tiers are not a ladder you climb. Most sites need the first one and, once, the fourth.

Tier 1: free tools, and why they are enough more often than anyone selling audits admits

Three tools cover most of what a paid audit reports, and all three cost nothing.

PageSpeed Insights runs Lighthouse on any URL and returns performance, accessibility, best practice, and SEO scores with the specific fixes. It is the tool behind every "your site is slow" slide in every agency deck. Run it yourself first.

Google Search Console tells you which pages are indexed, which are not and why, which queries you appear for, and where you sit. Nobody can audit indexation without it, which is why every audit starts by asking for access.

Ahrefs Webmaster Tools is free for sites you verify: a Site Audit that "scans your website for 170+ common technical and on-page SEO issues", 5,000 crawl credits per project per month, and a Site Explorer showing which pages and keywords bring traffic and who links to you. Screaming Frog's SEO Spider crawls up to 500 URLs free, which is the whole site for most companies.

What free tools cannot do is decide. They will tell you 47 images lack alt text and one page has a 4-second Largest Contentful Paint, at the same volume. They cannot tell you that the alt text is worth zero hours and the slow page is the one that would earn you a customer.

Tier 2: paid tools, for people who want the numbers every week

Verified today: Ahrefs runs from a $29 a month Starter through Lite at $129, Standard at $249, and Advanced at $449, with crawl credits from 100,000 to 1.5 million. Semrush starts at $139 a month for the SEO plan, then $199, $299, and $549, all with Site Audit included and a seven-day free trial. Screaming Frog's full licence is €245 a year and removes the 500-URL cap.

These are audit tools, not audits. They are worth the money when someone on your team opens them weekly and acts. If the plan is to buy one, run it once, and send the PDF to a developer, tier 1 already did that for free.

Tier 3: the free audit from an agency

Almost every agency offers one. Most are a form that produces an automated report and a calendar link. The value is not zero: a stranger looking at your site for ten minutes sees the thing you stopped seeing a year ago. But read the deliverable for what it is, which is the first page of a proposal.

A few are real. Apexure's landing page teardown is written by a person within 48 hours, asks for one page and its traffic source, and says plainly what it leads to: design and build from $2,000, or an optimisation retainer. That is an honest free audit, and it is the shape ours take too. The free page roast is a recorded teardown of one landing page with the fixes to make first, delivered within 48 hours. The website redesign checklist scores a site across six categories in thirty questions and hands back a prioritised plan. For hotels, the hotel website grader does the same in a minute. None of them require a call, and all of them are the top of a ladder whose prices are published on the next rung.

Tier 4: the productized audit, and what a real one looks like

This is the tier where the price buys judgement instead of data: a fixed fee, a fixed number of days, one senior person, and a deliverable that ranks. Ours is the SEO and GEO audit, from $3,000, delivered in three business days from the day we have read access. Because "audit" can mean anything, we ran it on our own site and published the result as the sample. These are its real numbers, from 28 August 2026.

The site scored 69 out of 100 across seven weighted categories. Content quality had moved from 42 to 72 in three weeks, not because anything was polished but because two integrity liabilities were deleted. Performance scored 45: our homepage ran Lighthouse mobile at 61 with an 8.5-second Largest Contentful Paint, our flagship product page at 54, our work index at 66, while one comparison page on the same stack scored 98 at 1.7 seconds. That last number is the finding. The slow pages were payload, not architecture, which made the fix a one-hour job instead of a rebuild.

The finding that reordered the whole roadmap was about visibility, not quality. Ninety days of Search Console queries in striking distance returned thirty rows, and eleven were the site's own name, seven were confusion with an unrelated Dutch staffing firm, four belonged to a different product on a subdomain. Real commercial queries in striking distance: effectively zero. So title tags and alt text went to the maintenance list and indexation went to the top. The flagship comparison page had never been crawled by Google, while its sibling was being cited by ChatGPT four times in one answer. Submitting one URL through the Indexing API was the highest-return action on the site, at 0.2 hours.

That is what a productized audit returns that tools cannot: a decision about what to ignore. The sample roadmap on the published audit carries an hours estimate on every row and a do-not-bother list, and the terms carry a promise the tools cannot make either: if the audit finds nothing worth doing, you pay half.

The same shape now exists for products. The product UX audit uses your web or mobile app as a new user, recorded, scores it across seven categories, and returns a fix list ranked by effort in hours and impact, in three business days for $3,000 flat.

Tier 5: the agency audit

Larger agencies sell the audit as the front of a retainer. WebFX publishes its SEO audit plans "starting at $8,600 / month", customised by site size and scope, with a 750-person team behind it. Most others do not publish a number at all, so any figure you read in a listicle is a guess; we could not verify one on 7 September 2026 and will not print one.

The deliverable is usually a long document, weeks in the making, thorough in the way a tool export is thorough. It is the right tier for a site with tens of thousands of pages and a team to act on two hundred findings. For a company with fifty pages and one developer, it is a very expensive way to learn what tier 1 would have told you, minus the ranking.

Which one you need

• You have never looked: tier 1, today, free. PageSpeed Insights on your three most important pages and Search Console's index report will fill an afternoon.
• You are about to spend on a redesign or a campaign: tier 4. The point is the ranked list before the budget, and the website design cost post has the tiers for what comes after.
• You run paid traffic to a page: a free teardown first, then the landing page experience rules Google actually publishes, then fix the page before you audit it again.
• You have a team that will act weekly: tier 2, and tier 4 once a year to decide what the weekly numbers mean.
• You have a hundred thousand pages: tier 5, and negotiate the audit separately from the retainer.

The honest test of any audit, free or $8,600 a month, is whether it tells you what not to do. The ones that only add to your list were written to sell you the work of clearing it.