Technical SEO audit services compared, and the eight checks the deliverable has to name

This page is about the narrow purchase. If you are comparing SEO audits generally, where the three products sold under that name differ by an order of magnitude in price, that question is answered separately and linked at the end. What follows is the technical half only: crawling, rendering, indexing and speed, bought from somebody who can read a log file.

The criterion: does the proposal name the check, the evidence it will produce, and who deploys the fix? A technical audit whose deliverable is a tool export with a cover page is a tool export with a cover page, whoever sells it.

The eight checks a technical deliverable has to name

The scope line, stated plainly

A technical audit answers can this site be crawled, rendered, indexed and served quickly. It does not answer whether the pages should exist, whether the content is any good, or which pages to build next. Those are the strategic half, and buying a technical audit while hoping for them is the most common disappointment in this purchase. Say which you want in the brief.

How to tell an engineer from a report generator in one question

Ask: which of the eight checks above will you do by hand, and will you want our server logs. A vendor who wants the logs and says so is doing the work. A vendor who does not mention logs is selling you a crawl, which is useful and is not an audit, and should be priced like a crawl.

Then ask who deploys the fix. A technical audit whose findings nobody has permission to ship is a document. Settle that before the engagement, not in week three.

The one check none of these tools runs, and who sells it

Every tool on this page measures a search engine. None of them measures the other place your buyer now asks, which is an assistant: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews compose an answer for each asker, naming some businesses and not others, and there is no index a crawler can read to find out whose name came up. It is outside the scope of a technical audit by definition, since it is not a property of your site at all, and an auditor who offers to include it should be asked how.

AI Knows Us sells that one measurement and nothing else. We are not an SEO tool and we are not in the ranking above, because a buyer who came here for a crawler or a keyword index should buy one of the tools named above instead. What we do is ask your buyer question in all five apps on a schedule and record which businesses were named. Our own figures, from the rendered text of our llms.txt read on 21 October 2026: one credit is one buyer question on one app once, most checks cost one credit and a Claude check costs three because Claude costs more to run. The published US floor is $149 a month for SEO Start, and that same file says SEO Start watches 0 buyer questions on 0 engines, so it is a demand harvest rather than an engine watch. The first tier that watches the five engines is Growth at $299 with 100 buyer questions and 1,200 scheduled answers a month. A managed option is published in rupees only, Rs 88,499 to Rs 2,35,999 a month at a three month minimum, so we are not going to convert it for you.

Where the tools on this page beat us, plainly. Ahrefs Brand Radar, read on 21 October 2026, tracks prompts on ChatGPT, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Claude. AI Mode and Copilot are two surfaces we do not read at all, and its page publishes an overage price of $0.020 per check and the cost of a Claude update at 8 checks, which is a level of unit disclosure worth holding every vendor to, us included. Semrush, whose SEO and AI search pricing page we read the same day, sells AI visibility inside the suite you may already be paying for, with 50 prompts tracked daily and 300 AI visibility reports a day on its Starter tier. Moz now publishes AI Explorer, described on moz.com as showing what the top AI agents say about your brand. If you already pay one of those three, their module is the cheaper route and you should take it. We are the single purpose option for somebody who does not want a suite.

Two cautions on how the work gets quoted

No competitor price table is reproduced on this page. What is quoted instead is the published limit that sets a tier, because a limit is the vendor's own statement of what you get and it does not move with the country you are reading from. That matters more than it sounds: on 21 October 2026 a fetch of one vendor's US pricing page from this machine returned Indian rupee prices, because the request left from an Indian address. A 200 response can still be the wrong page.

And treat an audit priced per URL with suspicion. The work scales with the number of templates and the complexity of the stack, not with how many product pages the template generated. A hundred thousand URLs built from six templates is a smaller job than two thousand URLs built from forty.

For the wider purchase, where a tool report, a technical audit and a strategic audit are sold under one name at three prices: SEO audit services compared, and what to require in the deliverable. On 21 October 2026 we read every link we could see on this site, 2,169 page bodies in all, against 2,082 live pages, and 935 of them, 44.9 percent, had no inbound link from any of those bodies. That figure is an upper bound rather than a count. No other page on this site links to the one above.

Questions about technical SEO audits

How long should a technical audit take?

A week or two of real work for a normal site, and most of that is reading rather than crawling. Anything delivered in two days is a tool export.

Do I need log files?

If the site is large or the indexing is odd, yes, and getting them is usually the slowest part of the project. Start the request before the engagement begins.

Can a technical audit be done without access?

Partly. A crawl and a render check need no access. Coverage needs Search Console and the useful half needs logs, so access is what decides how deep the audit can go.

What should the deliverable look like?

A prioritised ticket list a developer can act on, with evidence attached per item, plus a short summary for whoever signs it off. Not a two hundred page PDF.

How often should it be repeated?

After any platform or template change, and otherwise yearly. Between audits, a scheduled crawl and weekly coverage checks catch most of what would have appeared in one.