We Audited 30 SEO Tools' Own Websites. None Passed.
Founder, OrganicRank. Builds the crawler, the scoring and the fix pipeline described in these posts. Every claim here is one you can reproduce on your own domain.
Companies that sell technical SEO audits should have technically excellent websites. We crawled thirty of them to find out, put our own site in the sample, and did not come first.
The short version
- Not one of the 30 sites had a clean audit. The median health score was 80 out of 100.
- 54% of images across the industry have no alt text — 5,792 of 10,676 sampled.
- 37% were slow enough to flag on time to first byte, at a median of 340ms.
- 20% ship no structured data on their homepage, and 20% scored below 70.
- Our own site scored 88. Better than the median, and four sites beat it.
Why audit the auditors?
Because it is the one sample where the sites and the standard come from the same people. If a technical SEO fault is worth flagging in a customer's report, it is worth fixing on your own homepage — so the gap between what a tool reports and what its own site does is a fair measure of how seriously the industry takes its own advice.
This is not a gotcha. Every site here is built by people who know exactly what the checks are, which makes the results more interesting rather than less: these are not oversights born of ignorance. They are the ordinary result of a marketing site being nobody's full-time job.
That is the honest finding, and it is why we put our own domain in the sample before running anything. We scored 88 and four sites beat us.
How the study was run
Each of the 30 sites was crawled from its homepage plus a prioritised sample of internal pages, then audited with the same deterministic checks we run for customers. Every figure below is a count over that crawl — nothing is modelled, estimated or weighted.
One site at a time, with a pause between them and an identifiable user agent. We did not crawl deeply, and we did not touch anything a site asked us not to.
The checks are the ordinary technical set: indexability, titles and meta, heading structure, canonical tags, structured data, image alt text, response time, payload size, internal linking, robots and sitemaps.
Nobody had a clean audit
Zero of 30 sites came back with no findings. The median score was 80 out of 100, the best was 98, and the spread ran all the way down to 16.
A perfect score was never the realistic outcome and is not the point. The point is the shape: four fifths of the industry sits below 90 on the exact checks it sells.
| Score | Share of sites |
|---|---|
| 90–100 | 20% |
| 70–89 | 60% |
| Below 70 | 20% |
The alt text problem is the whole industry's
54% of images across the 30 sites have no alt text — 5,792 of 10,676 sampled. 93% of the sites have the fault somewhere.
It is also the single easiest fault on this list to fix, which is what makes the number remarkable. Alt text costs nothing, breaks nothing, and needs no redesign.
We think it survives because it is invisible to the people who own the page. A missing title tag shows up in a search result. A missing alt attribute shows up to nobody the marketing team ever meets.
The rest of the findings
After alt text, the most common faults were truncated titles, slow first-byte times, and heading structures with either no H1 or several.
The time-to-first-byte number is the one that ought to sting. 37% of companies selling Core Web Vitals reporting were slow enough to flag on the most basic speed measure there is, at a median of 340ms across the sample.
Structured data is the other one worth pausing on. A fifth of these homepages ship none at all, on sites whose own blogs explain why you should.
| Fault | Share of sites |
|---|---|
| Images missing alt text | 93% |
| Title truncated in results | 53% |
| Slow time to first byte | 37% |
| More than one H1 | 33% |
| Oversized HTML payload | 27% |
| Missing meta description | 27% |
| No H1 at all | 23% |
| Duplicate titles | 23% |
| No structured data on the homepage | 20% |
What we would actually conclude from this
That knowing is not the constraint. Every company in this sample knows precisely what is wrong with its own site — the fault is not a knowledge gap, it is that fixing it needs a developer, and the developer has other work.
This is the pattern we built our product around, and finding it here is the strongest evidence we have that it is real. If the people who write the checks cannot get the checks actioned on their own sites, the problem was never the report.
The list of faults is easy. Someone with commit access and a spare afternoon is the hard part.
Frequently asked questions
Which SEO tool had the best website?
The highest score in the sample was 98, and four sites scored 90 or above. We are publishing the distribution rather than a per-company table: the aggregate findings are the story, and a league table of competitors' faults reads as marketing rather than research however fair the underlying data is.
How was health score calculated?
100 minus a fixed penalty for each finding, weighted by severity — critical faults cost more than low ones. The same formula runs on every audit we produce, so two runs on the same site always give the same number.
Is a low score proof a site ranks badly?
No, and it is worth being clear about that. Several of these sites rank extremely well despite their findings, because authority and content quality outweigh technical faults at the top of the market. Technical health is what makes the rest of your work count — it is not a substitute for it.
Can I reproduce this?
Yes, and that is the point of publishing the method. Run the free audit on any of the domains and you will get the same checks applied the same way. Scores will drift as sites change.