Website Audit: What It Covers, and the Link Checks Most Audits Skip

What is a website audit?

A website audit is a review of how well a site can be found and used: whether search engines can crawl and index it, how fast its pages load, whether each page answers the search it targets, and which links point to it. Most audit tools crawl your own site and report on the first three. The links part often stops at a backlink tool's count of who links to you, without reading the pages the links sit on.

What a website audit covers

Google's own tools cover a lot of it for free: Page indexing, Core Web Vitals and Links are all reports in Search Console.

The link checks most audits skip

A backlink count tells you a link was seen once. It does not tell you whether a link you placed is still on the page, still followed, in the article, or on a page anyone reads. bklink audits read each page for that. Across every account's audits of placed links, as mxverify's /audits page showed them on 23 October 2026 — 4,447 links on 3,001 publications, 14,487 checks:

• Fewer than a third were followed. 31% of the placed links whose page could be read were followed; the rest were nofollow or sponsored, or no longer on the page.
• Most stayed put once they were there. 83% were still on the page at the latest check, and of links read twice, 95% were still there the second time.
• Few articles were originals. Only 11% of placed links sat in an article that ran on one site alone; the rest were in copies republished on other sites.
• Most read as low-value links. Of the 1,909 links whose page our model read, 97% read as press-release, syndicated, profile or network links (levels C and D), and 3% as editorial or guest-post links (A and B).

The full record, with every publication, is on mxverify's audited backlinks page.

How to audit the links you placed

1. Keep the list: every placement, its page address and what you paid or agreed.
2. Open each page signed out. Is your link there, an <a href> to your site, and what does its rel say?
3. Note where it sits — in the article, or in a sidebar, footer or author box — and whether the article ran anywhere else.
4. Check the page is indexed. A link on a page Google never indexed passes nothing.
5. Read it again in a month. Links are removed and edited after they are placed.

A bklink audit does these reads for a whole list and re-checks them over time.

Method and limits

• Placed links only. Links a backlink scan found (mentions nobody arranged) are counted apart: 1,808 links on 319 publications, none of them in the figures above.
• These are placements our users chose to audit, including our own accounts', not a random sample of the web. They describe those links, not every link on the sites.
• Each share is over the links it could be read on: a page that blocked the reader is left out of "followed" and "still on the page", and "in the article" and the levels need the page read by our model.
• Same totals as mxverify's /audits page, read on 23 October 2026.