SEOAST vs Screaming Frog: a site crawler and a page audit do different jobs

The 11 checks behind this

Each one is a check that runs, described by the engine itself. If a check changes, this page changes with it.

• HTTP status

  http_status

  The status of the final response after redirects. Fails on anything outside the 2xx range, because a URL that does not answer 200 has no document to index; warns on a 2xx that is not 200. Reports not_measurable when the audit was run against supplied HTML rather than a live fetch.

  Fixing it: Gives search engines a document to index at this URL at all.

• Redirect chain

  redirect_chain

  Every hop followed to reach the page. Fails on a loop, on any hop through plain http, and at 3 or more hops; warns above 1. Each hop costs crawl budget and adds latency for every visitor.

  Fixing it: Cuts latency for every visitor and stops crawl budget being spent on hops.

• robots.txt

  robots_txt

  The origin /robots.txt, parsed to RFC 9309: consecutive user-agent lines share a group, the most specific group wins, and the longest matching pattern decides with Allow winning ties. Fails when the audited path is disallowed for Googlebot; warns when the file is absent or declares no Sitemap. Distinct from the robots meta tag: a disallow here stops the crawl, not just the indexing.

  Fixing it: Lets crawlers read the page, so every other signal on it can be seen.

• Robots meta directives

  robots_meta

  Directives across meta robots, googlebot, bingbot and googlebot-news tags. A noindex or none directive fails the check outright because it removes the page from search regardless of every other signal; nofollow warns because it strips the page of its outbound crawl value.

  Fixing it: Removes a directive that keeps the page out of search regardless of its content.

• X-Robots-Tag header

  x_robots_tag

  Indexing directives delivered in the response header rather than the markup, including any bot-name prefix. A noindex or none fails; nofollow warns. This is checked separately from the robots meta tag because the two disagree often and a header-level noindex is invisible in the HTML.

  Fixing it: Removes a header-level block that keeps the page out of the index entirely.

• Canonical URL

  canonical

  Presence of <link rel="canonical">, whether its href is absolute in the markup, whether it resolves to the audited URL itself, and whether more than one canonical is declared. A missing or conflicting canonical lets parameter and trailing-slash variants compete with the page.

  Fixing it: Consolidates duplicate URL variants onto one address, so ranking signals stop being split.

• Title tag

  title

  Presence, length and structure of <title>. Fails when absent or empty; warns outside 15-60 characters (Google truncates around 60) or when a separator-delimited segment such as the brand name is repeated within the same title.

  Fixing it: Improves the strongest on-page relevance signal and the line people click.

• Heading hierarchy

  heading_hierarchy

  The h1-h6 outline: how many h1 elements exist, whether any heading is empty, and whether the document skips a level (an h2 followed directly by an h4). Zero or multiple h1 elements and skipped levels both make the page outline ambiguous to crawlers and screen readers.

  Fixing it: Gives crawlers and screen readers an unambiguous outline of what the page covers.

• Server-rendered content

  render_dependency

  Visible text as a share of the response body, plus inline script share and server-rendered word count. Fails under 60 words alongside a script-heavy document, or below a 2% text ratio; warns below 5%. SEOAST executes no JavaScript, so this measures what a crawler sees before deciding whether to queue a rendered pass.

  Fixing it: Puts the content in the first response, where every crawler reads it, instead of behind a render pass that is neither fast nor guaranteed.

• Structured data (JSON-LD)

  structured_data

  Every <script type="application/ld+json"> block: whether it parses as JSON, whether it declares an @type (walking arrays and @graph), and which types are present. A block that fails to parse is worse than no block at all, because it forfeits rich-result eligibility silently.

  Fixing it: Makes the page eligible for rich results. Eligible, not guaranteed — Google decides whether to show them.

• Question-and-answer extractability

  qa_content

  Headings that end in a question mark, and summary/details blocks, in the main content — each paired with the copy beneath it, plus any FAQPage or QAPage JSON-LD. Fails when marked-up questions are absent from the visible copy, or when every question on the page has under 15 words beneath it; warns when questions carry no markup, when some go unanswered, or when an answer runs past 200 words before reaching the point. A page with no questions on it reports not_measurable — this measures how liftable existing answers are and does not require a page to have any.

  Fixing it: Lets an answer engine lift a complete answer off this page instead of a fragment of one.