Website health check: can Google read your site?

Enter your site. In a few seconds the check loads it the way a search engine does and tells you what is broken, what is worth fixing, and what is fine.

What the health check tests

13 things, on your home page, robots.txt, your sitemap and a few more pages. They fall in two classes, and the result keeps them apart, so “4 things are stopping Google” is never 4 missing descriptions.

4 tests that decide whether Google can read the site

9 tests for what is worth fixing

What this health check does not test

A health check for search is not a full audit of a site. This one does not measure:

• How fast the pages load. Use PageSpeed Insights, which is Google's own tool.
• Whether the site is secure, and whether it stays up. The check loads the site once.
• Links from other sites. Use the backlink checker.
• Where your pages rank, or why traffic changed. That is in your search data. The SEO doctor page goes through the usual causes of a drop.

When to run a website health check

After every launch and every rebuild. That is when the usual accidents happen: a noindex left on from staging, a robots.txt that still blocks everything, a canonical tag that still names the preview address. Each one is a single line, and each one can take a site out of Google.

A rebuild can also leave old addresses behind with no redirects. One site lost 96% of its impressions that way: read the case study.

Questions

Sources

Every statement about Google on this page is from Google's own documentation, read on 11 November 2026. Each entry quotes the sentence it rests on.

1. Google, How HTTP status codes affect Google’s crawlers, 4 February 2026. “In the case of Google Search, Google doesn't index URLs that return a 4xx status code, and URLs that are already indexed and return a 4xx status code are removed from the index.”
2. Google Search Central, Block Search indexing with noindex, 10 December 2025. “When Googlebot crawls that page and extracts the tag or header, Google will drop that page entirely from Google Search results, regardless of whether other sites link to it.”
3. Google Search Central, Robots.txt introduction and guide, 10 December 2025. “A robots.txt file tells search engine crawlers which URLs the crawler can access on your site.”
4. Google Search Central, How to specify a canonical with rel="canonical" and other methods, 10 July 2026. “A strong signal that the specified URL should become canonical.”
5. Google Search Central, Understand JavaScript SEO basics, 4 March 2026. “Keep in mind that server-side or pre-rendering is still a great idea because it makes your website faster for users and crawlers, and not all bots can run JavaScript.”
6. Google Search Central, What is a sitemap, 10 December 2025. “A sitemap helps search engines discover URLs on your site, but it doesn't guarantee that all the items in your sitemap will be crawled and indexed.”
7. Google Search Central, How to specify a canonical with rel="canonical" and other methods, 10 July 2026. “A strong signal that the target of the redirect should become canonical.”
8. Google Search Central, Influencing title links in Google Search, 10 December 2025. “Make sure every page on your site has a title specified in the <title> element.”
9. Google Search Central, How to write meta descriptions, 20 April 2026. “Snippets are primarily created from the page content itself. However, Google sometimes uses the meta description HTML element if it might give users a more accurate description of the page than content taken directly from the page.”
10. Google Search Central, Influencing title links in Google Search, 10 December 2025. “Google looks at various sources when creating title links, including the main visual title, heading elements, and other large and prominent text, and it can be confusing if multiple headings carry the same visual weight and prominence.”
11. Google Search Central, Intro to how structured data markup works, 10 December 2025. “You can help us by providing explicit clues about the meaning of a page to Google by including structured data on the page.”

A different question?

The same check answers these too:

• What went wrong with my SEO?: the usual causes of a traffic drop, with the research behind each.
• Why is my website not showing up on Google?: the reasons a site is not on Google, and which ones this check tests.
• All the free SEO tools are on one page.