How to do a website content audit in 2026 (with template)

Publishing content is just the start. To keep pages performing in both traditional search and AI platforms, you need to regularly analyze what's working, what's slipping, and what to do about it.

Large language models (LLMs) and search engines favor fresh, high-quality content, so outdated pages can quietly lose citations and rankings over time. A content audit helps you catch these issues before they compound.

In this guide, we'll walk you through a seven-step content audit process. We've also built a free content audit template that consolidates your data so you can run the analysis without rebuilding spreadsheets every time.

What is a content audit and why do one?

A content audit is the process of analyzing the existing content on your website to measure how well it’s performing and supporting your business goals. 

It can also include analyzing content about your company published on other platforms.

The process includes analyzing SEO performance, AI visibility, and conversions, allowing you to:

• Identify high-performing pages you should create more of or further optimize for conversions
• Find underperforming or outdated pages to update
• Remove irrelevant content, which improves organic search traffic
• Discover content gaps to cover on your website
• Uncover which pages rank for zero-click searches and contribute to brand visibility

Performing a content audit requires stitching together data from multiple sources. 

Although this takes effort, the results are actionable insights you can incorporate into your content strategy.

How to do a content audit (step by step)

Follow these seven steps to audit your content for both traditional search and AI visibility.

1. Define your goal

To define your content audit goal, pick what you want to improve (like organic traffic, conversions, or AI visibility) and attach an outcome to each.

While your content audit can have multiple goals, we recommend prioritizing them to avoid diluting your efforts.

For example, you could set the following priorities:

• First priority: Improve blog content visibility in traditional search and AI platforms like Gemini and Perplexity
• Second priority: Increase conversions from blog traffic

Attach a clear outcome to each priority, such as:

• First priority outcome: Increase the blog’s organic search traffic by 20% and LLM referral traffic by 5% in three months
• Second priority outcome: Grow conversions from blog traffic by 3%

Once you're clear about your goal, you can tailor your content audit process accordingly.

If you haven't yet, make a copy of our content audit template. We'll use it throughout to consolidate performance data and make the analysis easier.

After this step: You have a clear audit objective and success metrics.

2. Define the audit scope

To define your audit scope, you need to decide which pages to include. Most content audits focus on the website, or a specific part of it like the blog or product pages.

But with the growth of AI-powered search, you might want to broaden the scope to all platforms where your brand is present. LLMs pull from multiple sources to answer questions about your brand, so making sure your representation is accurate across those platforms protects how you show up in AI answers.

Here’s how you can compile a list of relevant pages within your scope:

Owned media

Owned media is all content published on channels you control, including your website and social media platforms.

First, collect a list of all the relevant pages on your website. Depending on your goals and scope, this could be the entire website or just one part of it.

If you have a small website, it’s easy to manually collect all the links.

For larger websites, use a tool like Site Audit to find pages automatically.

To get started, open the tool, enter your website URL, and click “Start SEO Audit.”

Specify subsections of your website that you want to audit so the tool can focus on those areas only.

You can do this by going to the “Allow/disallow URLs” tab and adding the relevant subfolders in the first box.

For example, you might include /blog/, /resources/, and any other subfolders containing your content.

Once you’re done, click “Start audit.”

The tool will take up to a few minutes to collect data.

Once it’s done, go to the “Crawled Pages” report, and you’ll get a list of pages found by the tool. Export the list as a CSV file (there’s an export button in the top right corner).

You can also use Screaming Frog to extract a list of URLs. The free version crawls up to 500 URLs, which works for smaller sites; for larger crawls you'll want the paid version or Site Audit.

Once you have a list of URLs to audit, copy and paste them into the "URLs" column of the "Master Sheet (Owned)" tab in your copy of the content audit template.

If you publish videos, add them to the content audit spreadsheet too. This gives you an overview of their impact and which videos perform best.

For now, paste each video URL into the "Videos" tab of the template and fill out the "Views" column with the most recent data.

Optional: Earned and shared media (in scope)

For a comprehensive content audit, consider including earned and shared media in your analysis.

Earned media is content that you didn't publish, like unsolicited reviews and press coverage.

Look for earned media across sources like:

• Industry publications and news sites
• Review sites (G2, Trustpilot, Capterra)
• Third-party mentions (roundup and comparison blogs, newsletters, podcasts)

Then paste the URL of each piece into the “Earned Media” tab in the content audit template.

For each URL, note the following in the audit template:

• Date of publishing: If available
• Content type: User review, competitor comparison, product roundup, press coverage, podcast, etc.
• Sentiment: Positive, neutral, negative
• Product messaging alignment: Accurate, requires updating
• Type of mention: Linked, unlinked
• Featured: Brand, product, employees

Use tools like Google Alerts to proactively stay on top of new mentions, and add them to the audit spreadsheet.

Shared media is content that users create or post about you. It includes organic (unpaid) social content and content created for paid partnerships like influencer campaigns.

Create an inventory of shared media by finding:

• Social media posts that talk about your brand
• User discussions on Reddit and other forums

For each piece of content, note the following in the audit template:

• Date of publishing
• Source platform
• Any links provided (product page, video, etc.)
• Any campaign tags or UTM codes
• Sentiment
• Number of likes (if applicable)
• Number of comments (if applicable)

After this step: You have a clear scope for the audit. And you’ve filled out the “Earned Media”, “Shared Media”, and “Videos” tabs in the content audit template. And pasted the website URLs into the “Master Sheet (Owned)” tab.

3. Retrieve performance data

Once you have a content inventory, gather data on how each page is currently performing. This shows you where you stand so you can work toward your goal.

In each platform below, you'll download a CSV file containing important data. Hold onto these CSV files: we'll show you how to unify the data in the next step.

Organic traffic

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and Google Search Console (GSC) are tools where you can find organic traffic data.

Let’s say you’re auditing your blog performance data over the last three months. 

First, go to GSC and compare the last three months to the previous three months. 

To do so, go to "Performance." Then click "More" > "Compare," and set the filter to compare the last three months to the previous period.

Then, add a page filter to remove any irrelevant pages from the dataset. For example, if you’re auditing the blog, you need to filter out all other pages.

Click "+ Add filter" > "Page." Select "URLs containing," and type "blog" in the search bar. Click "Apply."

Then download the data as a CSV file by clicking the “Export” button in the top right corner. Name the file “GSC Organic Traffic Data.”

The file contains a page-level blog performance breakdown from Google search, including:

• Clicks
• Impressions
• Click-through rate (CTR)
• Average position for all the queries it ranks for

To find organic search traffic in GA4, go to "Reports" > "Acquisition" > "Traffic acquisition." Adjust the date range to "Last 90 days."

Then, build a filter that isolates organic traffic to the pages you're auditing. Filter by "Session primary channel group" set to "Organic Search" and "Landing page + query string" containing your subfolder (e.g., "blog").

Export the data in a CSV file and name it “GA4 Organic Traffic Data.”

LLM referral traffic

GA4 captures referrals from LLM platforms like Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity in the same place as other referrals, so you can see which pages are pulling visits from AI platforms.

To download this data, follow the same GA4 steps as above, but set "Session source" to match the LLM platforms (like "chatgpt.com," "perplexity.ai," and "gemini.google.com") that appear as options.

Download the CSV file and name it “LLM Referral Data.”

Video performance

Videos can appear in organic search results, so collect data on their rankings too.

Here's how to do this with Semrush Organic Rankings.

Paste the URL of the video and click “Search.”

The report shows how many keywords the video ranks for, plus the rankings distribution.

Make sure to set the search filter to “Exact URL.”

Then, type the number of keywords in the corresponding column of the “Videos” tab in the audit template.

Then, go to the “Positions” tab in Semrush. Find the target keyword of the video in the list of ranking keywords. This is the keyword that best describes the content of the video.

In this example, the target keyword is “how to trim cat nails.”

Paste the target keyword and your ranking position into the audit template. The position could be a number or a search engine results page (SERP) feature, such as a video carousel.

Keyword rankings

Keyword rankings data shows where your content pages currently rank.

The GSC report you already downloaded contains data on the average ranking of all the keywords a page ranks for. 

But it’s also important to understand where your pages rank for their primary or target keyword. 

Use Semrush’s Position Tracking tool to download this data.

Open the tool, enter your domain name, and click “Set up tracking.”

Input the primary keywords your pages are targeting.

If you don’t have a list of primary keywords you want to track, you can connect Position Tracking to GSC and import keywords from GSC.

Click “Start Tracking.”

Position Tracking will start collecting daily ranking data, available within 24 hours.

Go to the “Pages” tab in the report. It shows where your pages rank for the primary keywords you specified. Download a CSV version of this report by clicking “Export.” 

Name the file “Semrush Keyword Rankings.”

Backlinks

Backlinks are links that point from other websites to your own. 

When auditing your pages, check how many backlinks each page has earned. Helpful and authoritative pages tend to get more backlinks, which contribute to SEO.

The data also allows you to find pages that may be underperforming due to a lack of quality backlinks.

Use Semrush’s Backlinks tool to get this data.

Input your domain and click “Analyze.” Note that you can also check the backlinks of subfolders (example.com/blog) or subdomains (blog.example.com).

Go to the “Indexed Pages” tab, which shows the number of backlinks and unique domains pointing to each page.

Download the CSV file by clicking “Export.” Name it “Backlinks.”

AI citations

To measure how often your brand is being cited in AI answers, use the Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit. 

The tool allows you to find unlinked brand mentions that are important for boosting your AI visibility. It shows how your brand compares against competitors on share of voice, sentiment, and key business drivers. 

Add your domain and click "Analyze" to get started. Once the report is ready, go to "Brand Performance" > "Narrative Drivers," scroll to the "Citations" section, and select "Cited Pages" to see which websites are being cited in AI answers for your category.

Once you have your list of cited pages, review these sources to ensure they're accurate. Then reach out to the content creators to update any outdated information.

Consolidate performance data in one view

Now, take all the CSV files you downloaded in the previous steps and upload them to the content audit template. This gives you a unified view of page performance.

If you haven't done this already, make a copy of the template. Then copy the list of URLs you're auditing and paste them into the "URLs" column of the "Master Sheet (Owned)" tab.

Do not paste anything into columns B-U of the Master tab. This will overwrite the VLOOKUP formulas in those columns.

Then, open each CSV file you downloaded:

• GA4 Organic Traffic Data
• LLM Referral Data
• Semrush Keyword Rankings
• Backlinks

Copy and paste the data from each file into the corresponding tab in the content audit template. Double-check that the columns in your CSV file line up with the template before pasting.

Important: Do not change the names or order of the columns or tabs. The template includes a VLOOKUP formula that will break if you make these changes.

Go back to the Master tab after you fill out the other tabs. In columns B-U, hover over the bottom-right corner of the cell in the third row until you see a small blue square. 

Click and drag it down to the last row of the data. This will copy the VLOOKUP formula to other rows.

All of the rows in columns B-U of the Master tab will populate after you drag down the formulas, giving you a unified overview of your content performance.

After this step: You have downloaded CSV files containing organic search traffic, LLM referral traffic, keyword rankings, and backlinks data. And you have consolidated the content audit data in one spreadsheet.

4. Analyze the content

To analyze your content, examine each page for cannibalization, poor performance, on-page SEO issues, content quality, and content gaps.

Cannibalization

Cannibalization is when more than one webpage has the same purpose and targets similar keywords.

This hurts SEO because search engines are unable to determine the best option to serve users.

Look for the following in your content audit spreadsheet to identify cannibalization:

• Similar URL slugs: Pages with overlapping content often have similar URLs, which allows you to find the main offenders without manually checking each page
• Overlapping keywords: Pages target the same or nearly the same primary keywords with very similar search results
• Low rankings: None of the pages rank on the first page of Google

If you’re unsure, check the keyword rankings of pages in GSC or Semrush Organic Rankings. Pages that cannibalize each other will usually have multiple overlapping keywords.

Fixing cannibalization requires consolidating all the content onto one page (the page with the best historical performance) and redirecting the other URLs. You'll learn how to do this in step 6.

Poor performance

Scan the Master Sheet tab for URLs that have received little to no traffic during your audit window.

Pages with consistently poor performance are good candidates for content consolidation or removal, especially if the content is outdated, never performed well, and is irrelevant for your brand.

This is also called content pruning, which leads to a better user experience on your site. It also ensures that you don’t waste your crawl budget on low-quality pages.

On-page SEO

Your content’s performance also depends on its on-page optimization. This refers to the various elements within the page itself that influence how well it can rank in search engines.

Some key on-page factors are:

• Title tag: The page title that shows up on browser tabs and can appear in search results
• Meta description: The brief page description that can appear under the title in search results 
• Header tags (H1, H2, etc.): The hierarchical headings that structure the content
• Content quality: The depth and overall value of the page's main content
• Keyword optimization: How well the target keywords are naturally incorporated into areas like the title, headers, body copy, etc.
• URL slug: The last portion of the URL that identifies the page
• Alt-text: A brief description of images that isn’t visible on-page but helps Google’s crawlers and people using screen readers to understand what each image portrays
• Date of last update: When the page content was last changed, signalling freshness to search engines and LLMs
• Schema markup: A type of code on your website that describes your content structure to search engines and LLMs
• Quality internal and external links: No links are pointing to low-quality websites, and the anchor text matches the content of the target page 

When auditing your content, you should confirm whether it’s optimized for on-page SEO.

Here’s how to do it using this blog post about leading meetings as an example.

The primary keyword "how to lead a meeting" appears in the title, URL slug, and introduction. The article also incorporates this keyword in an H2 and uses secondary keywords like “how to run a meeting” in H3s.

There are relevant internal links throughout the piece. For example, one link takes readers to an article about preparing for a meeting, which they would also find helpful.

The meta description is clear and incorporates the target keyword naturally: “If you want to lead a meeting that’s both productive and engaging, discover tips and strategies to lead meetings that drive results—and see what to avoid.” 

However, we should note the length. At 154 characters, the meta description is long and will be truncated in mobile search results.

However, the article was last updated in 2024, so users and LLMs will see it as outdated.

But on the whole, the article is comprehensive and uses images and video to keep users on the page. It's well-structured, with clear subheadings and bullet points, so it's not surprising it still ranks on the first page of search results for its target keyword.

Content quality

Review the content pages in your audit spreadsheet to find opportunities for quality improvement.

Elevating content quality will help you gain more citations by LLMs and Google, and provide a better user experience.

Quality content is comprehensive, useful, and relevant to your target audience. It contains the following elements:

• Clear and logical subheading structure
• Lists and content chunks, which improve readability and LLM optimization
• Search intent that delivers key insights immediately
• Comprehensive coverage of the topic
• Recent and relevant information
• E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) signals, like credible authors

Use this framework to evaluate your pages against these quality signals. Note any issues in the Master Sheet tab:

Any pages that don't meet the majority of these criteria should be rewritten. Pages with strong content but outdated information, weaker structure, or thin E-E-A-T signals can be refreshed instead.

If a page meets these quality standards but still underperforms in organic search, check the search results. There could be an AI Overviews snippet that’s reducing clicks.

Content gap analysis

A content gap analysis helps you identify subtopics that the top-ranking pages cover but yours don't.

Start by finding URLs in the Master Sheet tab with an average position between 10 and 30. These are strong pages with high potential to rank on the first page, but they could be missing information that the top-ranking content provides.

Use Keyword Gap to compare your page's keyword coverage to the top-ranking competitors for the same target keyword. Then, in Keyword Overview, look up the target keyword to analyze how the top results cover the topic and where they go deeper than yours.

Pay close attention to:

• Images, videos, or additional resources that increase user engagement
• Subtopics your page doesn’t cover
• The depth of information: you could cover similar subtopics, but competitors go a level deeper

Don’t stop at top-ranking content. Try to come up with unique angles or provide original data that no search result has covered yet. LLMs and Google are more likely to surface pages with original information that doesn’t appear anywhere else.

Log any content gaps in your content audit template. You'll need this information when developing your action plan in step 6.

Optional: Earned and shared media (analysis)

If your audit scope included earned and shared media, analyze how your brand is represented outside your website. 

This step is optional, but valuable, since earned and shared media mentions influence how AI platforms describe your brand.

For example, a competitor might publish a comparison blog post claiming your product isn't suitable for enterprise, and AI platforms and Google pick it up.

Now that you've discovered it, you can respond by asking the company to update the blog, or by publishing content on your website that supports your enterprise product.

In addition to inaccurate information, look at:

• Whether company mentions are increasing or decreasing
• The quality and authority of sources
• Overall sentiment
• Clarity around the category you operate in, product offering, and who you serve

Shared media analysis identifies which social platforms drive qualified traffic to your website and how users talk about your brand on them.

Use GA4 referral data to identify your top traffic-driving platforms. Then cross-reference with the engagement metrics from the posts you logged in the content audit template.

For example, a LinkedIn influencer could share your latest industry report, leading to a spike in referral traffic. You can then check report download data to see how many visitors converted.

Log your findings in the Earned Media and Shared Media tabs of the content audit template. 

If an external mention impacts a specific page on your website, note the URL in the “Impacted page” column.

Earned and shared media mentions can feed directly into your action plan in step 7. For instance, a competitor's inaccurate product description might warrant a new page or an update to existing product pages.

After this step: You can start filling out columns V-AF in the content audit template with key takeaways from your analysis. And columns H and J in the Earned and Shared Media tabs, respectively.

5. Check technical SEO

Technical SEO influences whether search engines and AI platforms can find, store, and display your content in search results.

So, you should check that there are no technical issues holding your content back. 

Start with the issues most likely to block AI visibility: broken internal links, accidental noindex tags on important pages, and pages excluded from indexing. These have outsized impact on what LLMs can find and cite.

These could be:

• Duplicate content: Substantive blocks of identical or near-identical content across multiple pages, which can hurt rankings
• Broken internal links: Links to your own pages that return 404 errors, which hurts crawlability (search engines' ability to explore your website)
• Rogue noindex tags: Noindex meta tags accidentally applied to pages you want indexed, which blocks them from search results
• Other indexing issues: Poor content quality, redirects, crawl errors, and other problems that can make pages invisible to searchers

Our guide to technical SEO auditing shows how to perform an in-depth analysis, including page speed and mobile friendliness.

You can check whether your site is affected by any of these issues (and others) using Semrush’s Site Audit tool.

Create a new project in the tool and set up an audit of your entire website. 

After the audit is done, first go to the “Issues” tab. These are the issues your website pages have (including some of your content pages).

If you click on the issue link, you’ll see a list of affected pages.

If you click "How to fix," you'll find more details about the issue and how to fix it.

You can also find technical SEO issues in GSC, including issues that impact page indexing.

Go to the "Pages" report to find unindexed pages and the reasons they weren't indexed.

Here, you can find pages with broken links that lead to a "Not Found (404)" error.

Many broken links impact your site structure, crawlability, and user experience. Fix them using 301 redirects.

Go to “Settings” > “Open Report” next to “robots.txt” to check if there are issues with the robots.txt file. This important file tells search engine crawlers which pages on your website to crawl and which to ignore.

If you suspect noindex issues are blocking pages you want indexed, check the "Pages" report in GSC for the "Excluded by 'noindex' tag" status. Note: noindex directives belong in HTML meta tags or X-Robots-Tag HTTP headers, not in robots.txt. Google stopped supporting noindex in robots.txt in September 2019.

After this step: You have identified the top technical issues impacting your website. And logged them in the content audit template.

6. Implement an action plan

Take the analysis you’ve done so far and turn it into an action plan. 

Google's ranking algorithm rewards websites that publish people-first content and prioritize topic expertise, so your action plan should reflect that.

Also, keep AI search platforms in mind. While organic search is still a major driver of traffic for most websites, a growing number of users are relying on AI search.

Use the "Action" column in your content audit template to assign one of four labels to each URL: “Keep As Is”, “Update”, “Consolidate & Redirect”, or “Delete.”

Here’s a decision framework you can use:

Keep as-is

If a page or video is already meeting or exceeding the performance goals you set initially, then leaving it as is may be the right move.

In your content audit template, these are well-structured pages where performance metrics are stable or improving, E-E-A-T scores are strong, and there are no content gaps or cannibalization issues. 

Mark them as "Keep" in the Action column.

But you should also double-check the content is still accurate and relevant.

If it is, then that page may not need any changes.

Update

You should update a page when you see one or more of the following in the content audit spreadsheet:

• Declining traffic
• Poor E-E-A-T signals
• Content gaps
• Unclear structure
• No content chunking

If you have an SEO-focused goal, look closely at the page's current ranking. Improving the ranking will likely lift organic traffic, which moves you toward your traffic goal.

When updating the page, try to improve its quality by following the criteria from step 4.

AI search platforms tend to favor recent content. If a page is older than six months, consider updating it regardless of quality to keep LLMs citing it.

This might not require large-scale updates. You could incorporate recent news or research into the content. And leave the rest of the content as-is.

You’ll also need to make sure you’re following on-page SEO best practices. And that there are no technical SEO issues impeding your content’s performance.

For video, consider changing the title, description, or thumbnail to make it more compelling, and add the primary and related keywords to the description and title.

Consolidate & redirect

This option makes sense when you have duplicate pages on your site (which you can identify in Site Audit).

Instead of having overlapping content across multiple pages, consolidate the best elements into one definitive piece and redirect the others to the main one.

This approach has two key benefits:

• It prevents you from competing with yourself for the same keyword in search results
• It funnels all the link equity (ranking strength) to a single canonical (main) URL to boost its ability to rank

Let's say you have three separate blog posts that all cover how to use Instagram for business, and you’re not sure how to proceed. Here’s what to do in that case:

1. Identify which one is already ranking highest to use as the starting base
2. Mark the surviving URL as "Update" and the others as "Consolidate & Redirect" in the Action column
3. Then, cherry-pick the great examples, tips, etc. from the other two posts and add them to the main one
4. Finally, implement a 301 redirect from the other two posts to the newly modified version. This can improve its position in search results.

If your CMS is WordPress, a plugin like Redirection makes 301 redirects easy to set up. For other CMSs, your hosting provider or developer can implement redirects at the server level.

Delete

Sometimes, the right move is to delete the page. 

If your goal is centered on SEO and AI visibility, look for pages in your content audit spreadsheet that show:

• No organic or LLM referral traffic
• No conversion events
• No backlinks or AI search citations
• Targets a keyword (or covers a topic) that isn't important for your business

Before deleting, always check Google Analytics to ensure the page isn’t getting a significant amount of traffic from other sources like social. Deleting a page like this could negatively impact your business.

After this step: You have a clear action assigned to every page in your audit and, where applicable, a redirect plan in place.

7. Measure your results

After you've implemented the action plan, check whether you've achieved your goal.

Look at:

• Rankings improvements in the Position Tracking tool
• LLM referral traffic growth
• More citations for the prompts you’re monitoring in the AI Visibility Toolkit
• Higher conversion rates
• More quality backlinks
• Higher click-through rate in GSC
• Increased user engagement in GA4

We recommend waiting at least two months before analyzing performance if your goal is SEO and AI visibility. This gives search engines and LLMs enough time to process the updates and for any positive impact to show up in organic traffic.

After two or three months, rerun the analysis. Make sure to:

• Compare the performance before and after the audit using the same data sources, and the same time period
• Factor in any seasonal traffic trends that could impact page performance and skew your comparative analysis
• Evaluate whether each action was successful. For example, check if updated pages saw improved traffic or if consolidation resulted in better rankings for the surviving page.
• If the action was unsuccessful, revisit the page, the target keyword, and the SERP. It’s possible that the search intent has changed, the keyword became more competitive, or that AI Overviews are impacting click-through rates.

Keep copies of previous audits and compare the results quarterly. To make comparative analysis faster, download the spreadsheets as CSV files and upload them to an LLM like Claude. Prompt it to extract key performance changes over a given time period.

After this step: You have a clear understanding of the action items that worked and how to investigate unsuccessful results.

FAQs

How often should you do a content audit?

Conduct content audits on a quarterly basis to ensure your content remains relevant and effective.

The exact frequency can vary based on the size of your website. And how often you publish new content. 

For smaller websites with infrequent new posts, a biannual content audit might be enough.

Our 2023 State of Content Marketing report indicates that one-third of marketers conduct content audits twice a year. 

It’s also a good idea to audit your content after a Google core algorithm update to understand how it impacted your website.

How can you get buy-in from stakeholders for a content audit project?

To get approval for an audit, start by clearly explaining the benefits. Such as improving metrics like traffic, engagement, and conversions.

And work directly with your stakeholders to define a clear goal for the audit.

Then, outline the specific process you'll follow, the criteria for evaluating content, who will be involved, and the estimated costs versus potential returns. 

With this strategic approach, you can increase your chances of securing buy-in from stakeholders. 

Which tools should you use when doing a content audit?

When conducting a web content audit, you’ll need a variety of tools to collect different types of data. 

For an SEO-focused content audit, essential tools include:

• GA4: For insights into your content's organic traffic
• Excel or Google Sheets: For organizing and analyzing data
• Site Audit or Screaming Frog: For a list of your relevant content pages and the issues affecting them
• Position Tracking and Backlinks: For ranking and backlink data on your pages
• Keyword Overview: For analyzing the SERP and identifying content gaps
• AI Visibility Toolkit: For measuring brand visibility and sentiment on AI search platforms

How can you use AI for a content audit?

You can use AI to help with various content audit tasks, including:

• Extracting patterns from traffic data
• Reading your content and comparing the quality to the top-ranking pieces
• Identifying content gaps
• Detecting duplicate content
• Finding content consolidation opportunities

Let’s say there are 500 URLs in your content audit spreadsheet. And you want to identify irrelevant pages that bring in little to no traffic.

You could upload the spreadsheet to an LLM and use a prompt like: “Find URLs that have received less than 50 clicks and rank for keywords that are irrelevant to my business. Also use the URL slug to determine a topic’s relevance, not just keywords.” 

Provide the LLM with additional context about your business, such as product descriptions and buyer personas. The information should be concise, as overloading the LLM with too much context can lead to mixed results.

For best results with larger spreadsheets or nuanced analysis, use a more capable model like Claude Sonnet 4.6. Free tiers can handle smaller audits but may struggle with the largest files or the most complex prompts.

Use content audits to win in the new era of search

The quality of your content library directly affects your visibility in search engines and AI platforms. Regular audits help you apply the latest best practices and spot trends you can use to your advantage.

In this guide, we outlined a repeatable content audit process that covers identifying goals, analysis, action, and measuring results.

Keep a copy of the content audit template and re-use it quarterly, after Google algorithm updates, or following major website changes. Each completed audit is a baseline for the next one and gives you a clear overview of your progress.