Semrush Site Audit: Configure, Prioritise and Retest

Semrush Site Audit is a cloud crawler inside a Semrush project. Use it to locate affected URLs and recurring technical patterns, then confirm each priority on the live or rendered page. Its Site Health score is a summary of Semrush checks, not a forecast of rankings or traffic.

What Is Semrush Site Audit?

Semrush's Site Audit documentation covers crawlability, HTTPS, international SEO, Core Web Vitals, performance and internal linking reports, plus issue review and crawl comparison. The feature is useful when audit work needs to share a project with other Semrush modules.

Run Your First Audit

1. Create the project and set a page limit that can include every intended template.
2. Choose the crawl source, domain scope, user agent and URL include or exclude rules.
3. Use JavaScript rendering only when the rendered page materially differs from the initial HTML and your plan supports it.
4. Set crawl speed with the site owner, especially on staging or constrained infrastructure.
5. Save the settings and compare the discovered URL count with a sitemap and known inventory.

Use Site Health as a Trend

Open the errors, warnings and notices behind the score. A score change may reflect a release, a changed crawl scope or a revised Semrush check. Keep crawl settings comparable and investigate the URLs before reporting the movement as improvement or decline.

Use Thematic Reports to Find Patterns

• Crawlability and indexability: compare status, robots, canonical and sitemap signals with the intended state.
• HTTPS: verify certificate and mixed-resource findings with browser and server evidence.
• International SEO: inspect reciprocal hreflang and canonical relationships on representative clusters.
• Core Web Vitals and performance: keep real-user field data separate from lab or crawler measurements.
• Internal linking: use source and destination URLs to repair broken or needlessly redirected links.

Choose What to Fix First

Prioritise a confirmed issue when it affects an important page group, blocks discovery or indexing, breaks a user journey, or repeats through a shared component. Export the URL set and add an owner, expected result and retest. Do not bulk-change a template because one automated severity label says “error”.

Compare Audits Over Time

Keep scope and settings stable, annotate releases, and separate new, fixed and recurring findings. Rerun after deployment, then manually check a sample of corrected URLs. Scheduled audits are most useful when someone owns that review step.

Semrush vs Ahrefs

Both are cloud crawlers within broader search platforms. The practical choice depends on the existing platform, crawl and rendering allowances, exports, team access and adjacent modules. Test the same URL set rather than comparing proprietary issue counts. Our Ahrefs, Semrush and Screaming Frog comparison provides a repeatable test.

Pricing and Limits

Semrush page, project and feature allowances depend on the current plan. The documentation available on 11 September 2026 included limited Site Audit access without an SEO Toolkit subscription and placed JavaScript rendering on higher access; verify the current pricing page and account limits before purchase.

Product facts checked against Semrush's official Site Audit knowledge base on 11 September 2026.