Every Linkstonic audit runs 14+ checks across your site’s performance, structure, security, and authority signals. Each check returns a status of Passed, Warning, or Failed. For every failed or warning item, Linkstonic attaches AI-generated remediation steps so you know exactly what to change and why it matters.
Prioritize Failed items before addressing Warnings. Failed checks have a direct negative impact on crawlability, rankings, or user experience, while warnings indicate areas for improvement rather than active problems.
PageSpeed (PSI)
Linkstonic fetches your mobile and desktop scores from Google PageSpeed Insights, with 24-hour database caching and automatic retry logic to ensure reliable results. A failure here means your Core Web Vitals are below acceptable thresholds, which can directly suppress rankings and increase bounce rates.
Mobile friendliness
This check validates your viewport meta tag, analyzes your mobile PSI scores, and reviews layout signals for responsive design. A failure indicates your site may render poorly on mobile devices — a critical issue given Google’s mobile-first indexing.
Content and structure
HTML quality
Linkstonic inspects your page’s fundamental HTML: title tag presence and length, meta description, H1 tags, charset declaration, doctype, image alt text, and the lang attribute. Failures here affect both crawl quality and accessibility compliance.
Schema markup
This check detects JSON-LD structured data on your page, validates its structure, and identifies missing rich result types that could earn you enhanced SERP features. A warning typically means schema is present but incomplete; a failure means no valid schema was found.
Duplicate content
Linkstonic scans for duplicate titles, meta descriptions, and H1 tags across pages in your audit. Duplicate signals dilute ranking strength and confuse search engines about which page to surface for a given query.
Crawlability
Sitemap
Your sitemap.xml is fetched and validated for correct format, URL count, and parse errors. A failure means Googlebot may not be able to discover all your pages efficiently.
Robots.txt
Linkstonic parses your robots.txt file, checks disallow rules, and flags any directives that block important pages or sections from being indexed. A failure here can mean key content is invisible to search engines.
Redirects
This check detects redirect chains (A → B → C), redirect loops, and the misuse of 302 (temporary) redirects where 301 (permanent) redirects are appropriate. Redirect chains dilute link equity and slow down crawling.
Security
Linkstonic checks for the following security headers and HTTPS configuration:
- HTTPS — Whether the page is served over a secure connection
- HSTS — HTTP Strict Transport Security enforcement
- X-Frame-Options — Clickjacking protection
- Content Security Policy (CSP) — Controls which resources the browser can load
- X-Content-Type-Options — Prevents MIME-type sniffing
Missing security headers are a trust signal for both users and search engines. Sites without HTTPS are flagged as insecure in browsers, which increases bounce rates and suppresses rankings.
International
Hreflang
For multilingual or multi-regional sites, Linkstonic validates your hreflang tags — checking for self-references, duplicate declarations, and invalid or malformed URLs. Incorrect hreflang implementation causes the wrong language version of your page to appear in search results.
Authority
Homepage authority
Linkstonic checks your homepage for key authority signals: a valid SSL certificate, a privacy policy page, a contact page, an about page, a blog or content section, and social media profile links. Each missing element reduces your site’s perceived trustworthiness and authority score.
Internal linking
This check analyzes your internal link structure to identify orphan pages (pages with no inbound internal links), deep pages (pages requiring many clicks from the homepage), average links per page, and anchor text distribution. Poor internal linking prevents link equity from flowing to important pages and hinders crawl efficiency.
Trust signals
E-E-A-T analysis
Linkstonic evaluates your site’s Expertise, Experience, Authority, and Trust signals — the same framework Google’s quality raters use to assess content quality. This check examines author information, credentials, case studies, testimonials, about page content, backlink signals, and trust indicators like HTTPS and privacy policies.
For a detailed breakdown of how E-E-A-T scoring works, see E-E-A-T Scoring.
AI fix guidance
Every failed or warning check includes AI-generated remediation steps directly in your audit report. You do not need to look up documentation or interpret raw error codes — Linkstonic explains the issue in plain language and gives you specific actions to take.
Example — fixing a Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) failure:
When PageSpeed returns a poor LCP score, the AI guidance might tell you to:
- Preload your hero image using
<link rel="preload"> in the document <head>
- Serve images in WebP or AVIF format to reduce file size
- Eliminate any render-blocking scripts that delay the LCP element from loading
- Check whether your hosting or CDN is adding response latency above 200ms
This level of specificity means you can hand the fix directly to a developer or implement it yourself without additional research.