Reading your audit report

Every audit lands you on a screen with three tabs and a Run a new audit button. Everything here is written for a non-technical site owner — no SEO jargon without its plain meaning.

If AI summaries are on, a short summary of what to fix first sits above the tabs. AI summary explains what it reads and what it sends.

The three buckets

• Fix now — problems Google reacts to fastest. Every row is either critical or a broken signal you can act on today.
• Watch — smaller issues, or checks where we did not have enough data to score. Worth tracking, not usually worth stopping the world.
• Passed — checks your site cleared. Reviewing this tab occasionally is a good sanity check.

Anatomy of an issue

Each row shows:

• Title — a plain-language name for the problem.
• Why it matters — one sentence on why Google or a real visitor cares.
• Where — the exact URL(s) affected, so you can jump straight there.
• Exact fix — the concrete change to make. A copy button puts the fix on your clipboard.

New audits and diff badges

Click Run a new audit after you have shipped a fix. The next audit compares against the last one and shows two badges on each row:

• Fixed — the rule that used to fail now passes on that URL.
• Regressed — the rule newly failed on a URL. New failures also count as regressions.

Diffs are taken against the frozen snapshot of your previous audit, so what you saw yesterday will still say the same thing tomorrow.

Audit history

Audit history lists your recent runs. When a run failed, its row says why, for example that the crawl ran past its time limit. Runs that failed before we started recording reasons say that no reason was recorded. If your newest run failed, the report keeps showing your last completed audit and says so at the top.

llms.txt

A /llms.txt file is an emerging convention: a plain-text pointer file that lets AI assistants (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and others) know which of your pages are safe to cite and preferred. RankMeFast treats this rule as advisory — we suggest adding one, but nothing is broken if you have not.

Every rule in plain words

• Blocked from Google — A robots.txt rule is telling Google to stay away. If the page should rank, remove the disallow line.
• Sitemap missing or weak — A sitemap is a file at /sitemap.xml that lists your pages. Add one and reference it from robots.txt.
• Page titles missing or weak — The <title> element decides your Google click bait. Aim for a specific, 30–60 character title on every page.
• Meta descriptions missing or duplicated — The one-line snippet Google shows below the title. Write a unique description per page.
• Page headings missing or overused — One <h1> per page, then <h2> / <h3> for structure. Missing <h1> is a big deal; two <h1>s is a smaller one.
• Canonical link missing or broken — A <link rel="canonical"> tells Google which URL is the "real" one. Missing or pointing off-site is bad.
• Structured data missing or broken — Machine-readable tags (JSON-LD) that help Google understand articles, products, FAQs.
• Broken internal links — Links from one of your pages to another that return an error. Fix or remove them.
• Thin content — Pages with very little text of their own. Each flagged page shows the length we measured: words for most languages, characters for Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Thai. There is no minimum word count; add what a visitor needs to decide or act on the pages that should rank.
• No FAQ signals found — No question-and-answer sections detected. FAQs help both users and AI assistants.
• llms.txt file missing (advisory) — An emerging convention: a /llms.txt file that hints AI crawlers about your best content. Not required — advisory only.
• HTTPS not enforced — Your site should redirect http → https and canonicalize the https version.
• Poor real-visitor performance — Real visitors experienced a slow page. Data comes from Google's Chrome UX Report, and sites with little traffic may have none of it yet.
• Low lab performance estimate — Our synthetic Lighthouse run scored low. A single run varies ~10 points; treat as a hint, not a verdict.
• Not mobile-friendly — Phones do not render the page well. Check tap-target sizes and the viewport meta tag.
• Not indexed by Google — Google looked at the page but did not add it to search. Reconnect Google Search Console if this rule cannot fetch data.
• Rich results issues — Structured data was recognized, but Google flagged errors that block enhanced search results.
• Indexed with warnings — The page is indexed but Google flagged a canonicalization or duplicate-content signal.
• Pages that answer with an error — Crawled addresses that returned an error (4xx or 5xx). Bring the page back or redirect the address. Addresses that refused our crawler (401, 403 or 429) may be bot protection, so check them in a browser first.
• Redirect chains and loops — Addresses that take two or more redirects to reach a page, or never reach one. Point the first address straight at the final page.
• Links that point to redirects — Internal links whose target redirects. Link to the final address instead.
• Pages that redirect with a refresh tag — A <meta http-equiv="refresh"> tag sends visitors on. Use a permanent (301) server redirect instead.
• Canonical tags that point to the wrong place — A canonical that points to a broken page, a redirect, another canonical, or back and forth between two pages. Point it at a working page that names itself.
• Pages no other page links to — Pages listed in your sitemap that no internal link reaches. Link to them from a related page or menu.
• Pages buried deep in the site — Pages more than three clicks from the home page. Bring the important ones closer.
• Pages that share a title — Two or more pages with the same <title>. Give each page its own.
• Pages that look like copies of each other — Pages the crawler judged near-identical, with a similarity score out of ten. Merge them or make each one distinct.
• Placeholder text on live pages — "Lorem ipsum" filler text on a published page. Replace it with the real copy.
• Secure pages linking to insecure addresses — HTTPS pages that link to http:// addresses. Switch them to https://.
• Images without alt text — Images with no alt attribute. Describe meaningful images and give decorative ones an empty alt.
• Pages slow to start loading — The crawler waited more than 1.5 seconds for the first byte, or more than three seconds for the page. One lab load from our crawler, not every visitor's experience.
• Very large pages — HTML over 1 MB. Over 3 MB the finding moves to Fix now.
• Pages sent without compression — HTML sent without gzip or Brotli compression. Turn compression on at the server.
• Scripts and styles that delay the first view — Files that block the first paint, with how many. Load scripts with async or defer.
• Pages missing basic HTML declarations — No <!DOCTYPE html> line or no character-set declaration.
• Outdated HTML on your pages — Removed tags, Flash or frames. Frames such as embedded videos can be fine, so check them rather than remove them.
• Addresses that are hard to read — Addresses with unusual characters, query parameters, or more than 120 characters.
• Pages without social sharing tags — No Open Graph tags, so a shared link may show the wrong title, text or image.
• No favicon — No small site icon for browser tabs and search results.
• Broken images, scripts or styles — Files a page needs that answer with an error. This check runs only on an audit started with the resource scan; otherwise the report lists it under Not evaluated.
• Images that are larger than needed — Images over 500 KB. Runs with the full resource scan, like the check above.
• Files browsers are told not to keep — Images, scripts and stylesheets sent with headers that stop browsers from caching them. Runs with the full resource scan.

Scanning images, scripts and styles

The last three checks need every image, script and stylesheet on your pages to be loaded. That costs more to crawl, so it is a separate option for each audit.

• On Pro and Agency, tick Scan images, scripts and styles before you start the audit. The option shows how many scan credits you have left.
• Each scanned audit uses one resource scan credit as well as its normal audit. If you have no scan credit left, the audit does not start and neither is used.
• A scanned audit crawls at most 1,000 pages, even if your plan allows more.
• Scan credits come from a one-time pack of 20 scans for $19 under Billing → Credits. Starter can't buy it. A self-hosted install scans without credits.
• If the scan can't be read, the audit still finishes. The credit stays used, and the three checks appear under Not evaluated with the reason.

When an audit ran without the scan, the Not evaluated note for these checks links to the pack.

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