SEO Insights
According to HTTP Archive and Chrome UX Report data from 2025, only 48% of websites pass all three Core Web Vitals on mobile and 56% on desktop. LCP remains the hardest metric to pass—just 62% of mobile sites achieve a good LCP score—while INP pass rates are 97% on desktop but drop to 77% on mobile, revealing how poorly many sites handle interactivity on phones and tablets.
Modern website audits have transformed from simple SEO checklists into comprehensive assessments spanning Core Web Vitals, AI search visibility, accessibility compliance, and E-E-A-T signals. Here's what B2B marketing leaders need to know.
A modern website audit in 2026 evaluates Core Web Vitals, AI search visibility, accessibility compliance, E-E-A-T signals, and dozens of technical factors that simply didn't exist a decade ago. The stakes are significant: SEO delivers a median ROI of 748%, yet only 48% of websites pass all three Core Web Vitals on mobile, and 94.8% fail basic accessibility standards according to WebAIM's 2025 analysis.
Google's Core Web Vitals remain the foundation of page experience measurement. These three metrics determine whether your website meets Google's user experience standards, and they're now confirmed ranking signals. Understanding and optimising for them is no longer optional for any business serious about organic visibility.
| Metric | What It Measures | Good | Needs Work | Poor |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| LCP | Loading speed | ≤ 2.5s | 2.5–4.0s | > 4.0s |
| INP | Interactivity | ≤ 200ms | 200–500ms | > 500ms |
| CLS | Visual stability | ≤ 0.1 | 0.1–0.25 | > 0.25 |
Critical update many businesses missed: INP (Interaction to Next Paint) replaced FID (First Input Delay) on 12 March 2024. Any audit still referencing FID is outdated. INP measures the full latency of every user interaction on a page—not just the first—making it a far more demanding and realistic metric.
The business case is compelling
Vodafone improved LCP by 31% and saw 8% more sales plus a 15% improvement in lead-to-visit rate. Rakuten optimised all CWV and achieved a 53% increase in revenue per visitor. A Deloitte study found that even a 0.1-second improvement in mobile load time drives an 8.4% increase in retail conversions.
The ranking impact of Core Web Vitals is real but nuanced. Google's John Mueller has stated that CWV is "not a giant factor" in ranking, but position-1 pages are 10% more likely to pass CWV than position-9 pages. The consensus among SEO researchers is that CWV functions as a tiebreaker: when competing pages have similar content quality and authority, passing CWV provides a measurable edge. For a detailed assessment of your site's performance, explore Whitehat's website audit service.
The WebAIM Million report for 2025 analysed the top one million homepages and found that 94.8% had detectable WCAG 2.2 Level A/AA failures, with an average of 51 accessibility errors per page. The six most common failures account for 96% of all errors: low-contrast text (79.1% of pages), missing image alt text (55.5%), missing form input labels (48.2%), empty links (45.4%), empty buttons (29.6%), and missing document language (15.8%).
These are automated findings only—manual testing would uncover even more issues.
The business cost is substantial. The "Purple Pound"—the spending power of disabled people and their families in the UK—is worth £274 billion per year. The Click-Away Pound Report estimates UK businesses lose £17.1 billion annually from disabled consumers who abandon inaccessible websites. Some 75% of disabled people have walked away from a UK business due to poor accessibility.
The legal landscape has tightened considerably since 2014. The UK's Equality Act 2010 requires "reasonable adjustments" for all service providers, and WCAG 2.1/2.2 Level AA is the accepted standard. The European Accessibility Act (EAA), which came into force on 28 June 2025, means UK businesses serving EU markets must comply regardless of Brexit. A comprehensive 2026 audit must include automated accessibility scanning followed by manual review of key user journeys.
Three seismic shifts between 2014 and 2026 have fundamentally changed what a website audit must examine: Google AI Overviews, the E-E-A-T framework, and the integration of the Helpful Content System into core ranking.
Google AI Overviews now reach 1.5 billion users monthly across 200+ countries and appear in 13–19% of searches. Their impact on organic traffic is severe. Research from Seer Interactive found that organic CTR dropped from 1.41% to 0.64%—a 61% decline—for queries triggering AI Overviews. Zero-click searches rose from 56% in 2024 to 69% by May 2025.
However, brands cited within AI Overviews enjoy 35% higher organic CTR. A 2026 audit must now include checks for AI Overview eligibility: ensuring pages aren't blocked by nosnippet directives, implementing FAQ and Article schema, structuring content in 40–60 word summarisable paragraphs, maintaining strong author attribution, and verifying AI crawler access in server logs. Learn more about optimising for AI search with Whitehat's Answer Engine Optimisation service.
E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) expanded from E-A-T in December 2022 and has become progressively more important. The December 2025 Core Update broadened E-E-A-T requirements beyond YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) topics to virtually all competitive queries.
A modern audit must examine E-E-A-T at three levels:
Google's January 2025 Quality Rater Guidelines update now directs raters to specifically assess AI-generated content, flagging low-quality automated content for the lowest quality rating.
The Helpful Content System was absorbed into Google's core ranking in the March 2024 Core Update—the most complex update in years. This means the quality signal is now site-wide: having a significant volume of unhelpful content drags down the performance of your entire domain. Google claimed this integration contributed to a 40% reduction in unhelpful search results.
A content audit is therefore essential: every page must be evaluated for genuine helpfulness, first-hand expertise, search intent alignment, and whether it provides value beyond what's already available. Pages that exist primarily for ranking purposes rather than user benefit must be improved, consolidated, or removed.
Google released an unprecedented volume of confirmed updates between 2024 and early 2026. The most significant include:
Integrated the Helpful Content System into core ranking. Introduced three new spam policies—scaled content abuse, expired domain abuse, and site reputation abuse ("parasite SEO"). Some previously-hit sites lost up to 97% of visibility. Forbes, WSJ, Time, and CNN received manual actions for site reputation abuse in November 2024.
Specifically promoted small and independent publishers—a response to community feedback about the March update's impact on smaller sites.
The first core update to explicitly target AI content quality. Mass-produced AI content without expert oversight reportedly saw 87% negative impact. Enhanced weighting of behavioural signals (dwell time, pogosticking, return visits). Stricter author attribution standards across all competitive queries.
The key audit takeaway from these updates is that content quality is now a site-level signal, not a page-level one. A 2026 audit must evaluate the entire content estate, flagging and remediating unhelpful, thin, or purely AI-generated content. Third-party content partnerships need careful review under the site reputation abuse policy. Whitehat's SEO services include comprehensive content quality audits aligned with these requirements.
Large-scale studies from Semrush analysing 100,000+ websites and 450 million pages reveal the scale of common technical issues:
These are foundational problems that erode crawl efficiency, user experience, and ranking potential.
On the positive side, HTTPS adoption has effectively become universal: 97.3% of websites now use HTTPS, and over 99% of Chrome browsing time occurs on secure connections. However, 28.7% of sites still have flawed SSL configurations (incomplete certificate chains, weak ciphers), and 27% have both HTTP and HTTPS versions accessible simultaneously—creating duplicate content and crawl budget issues.
Only about 31% of web pages include Schema.org structured data, despite clear evidence of its impact: pages with rich results see an average CTR increase of 20–30%, and schema-enabled websites are indexed 67% faster by Google. Schema is increasingly important for AI search visibility, as structured data helps AI systems extract and cite information. Google supports 35 types of structured data for search enhancements, though it deprecated several types in late 2025 (FAQ and How-To schema for general sites were already removed in 2023).
Mobile-first indexing was completed on 5 July 2024—Google's mobile crawler is now the universal default for all websites. Globally, 59–64% of web traffic comes from mobile devices, though the UK maintains a more balanced split at roughly 49% mobile, 47% desktop. B2B traffic skews even more toward desktop, with 64% of B2B site visits during business hours coming from desktop. Despite this, mobile bounce rates run 12 percentage points higher than desktop, and mobile conversion rates average just 1.8–2.2% versus 4.3–4.8% on desktop—revealing significant optimisation opportunities.
The audit tool landscape has consolidated and evolved dramatically. The core professional toolkit in 2026 includes:
Screaming Frog (£199/year) remains the gold standard for technical crawling, now with AI-powered semantic similarity detection and JavaScript rendering. Ahrefs (from $129/month) offers the industry's strongest backlink database with 28 trillion links and now includes AI-powered internal linking recommendations. Semrush (from $139.95/month) leads in AI innovation with Semrush Copilot for personalised recommendations and the first unified traditional + AI Visibility platform. Sitebulb (from ~£11/month) stands out for its "Hints" system that explains not just what issues exist but why they matter and how to fix them. Google Search Console remains irreplaceable and free—it's the only source of real CrUX performance data that Google actually uses for ranking.
The biggest emerging tool category is Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) auditing. Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit ($99/month add-on) tracks brand mentions across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and Google AI Overviews. Ahrefs' Brand Radar and Lumar's GEO tools offer similar capabilities. For more on preparing your content for AI search visibility, see our guide to showing up in ChatGPT search.
Best practice is continuous automated monitoring (weekly crawls minimum) supplemented by quarterly manual deep-dive audits and full strategic audits annually.
For B2B marketing directors evaluating whether to invest in a comprehensive audit, the data is unambiguous. The median ROI of SEO is 748%, with B2B SaaS specifically achieving 702% ROI. SEO leads convert at 14.6% versus just 1.7% for traditional outbound. Some 68% of all online experiences begin with a search engine, and 83% of companies plan to increase their SEO budget.
The cost of inaction is equally clear. A Liquid Web study found 67% of businesses reported lost revenue from poor website performance, with affected businesses losing an average of $20,172 per year—roughly 15% of revenue. Retail sites collectively lose $2.6 billion annually due to slow load times. And 88% of consumers won't return to a website after a bad experience, making every unresolved technical issue a compounding loss.
The Deloitte/Google "Milliseconds Make Millions" study demonstrated that for lead generation specifically, a 0.1-second speed improvement yielded a 21.6% increase in users reaching form submission pages and an 8.3% decrease in mobile bounce rate. The message is consistent: every friction point identified and resolved in an audit has a direct, measurable impact on revenue.
A 2026 website audit is a fundamentally different exercise from its 2014 equivalent. What was once a straightforward checklist of meta tags and broken links has become a multi-layered assessment spanning technical performance, content quality, AI readiness, accessibility compliance, and user experience—all interconnected by Google's increasingly sophisticated ranking systems.
The three most important shifts for B2B leaders to understand are:
The audit frequency should match this complexity—continuous automated monitoring paired with quarterly manual reviews. Given that only about half of websites pass Core Web Vitals and nearly 95% fail accessibility standards, the competitive advantage available to businesses that audit thoroughly and act on findings has never been greater.
Best practice is continuous automated monitoring (weekly technical crawls) supplemented by quarterly manual deep-dive audits and comprehensive strategic audits annually. Sites undergoing significant changes or experiencing traffic drops should audit more frequently.
A technical audit focuses on crawlability, indexability, and site architecture—factors like broken links, redirect chains, and Core Web Vitals. A full SEO audit adds content quality assessment, competitive analysis, backlink profile review, and strategic recommendations for improvement.
Costs vary significantly based on scope. Basic technical audits from freelancers typically cost £300–£1,000. Comprehensive SEO audits covering technical factors, content quality, and competitive benchmarking range from £1,000–£5,000. Enterprise-level audits for large websites may exceed £10,000.
Core Web Vitals are Google's three key metrics for measuring user experience: LCP (loading speed), INP (interactivity), and CLS (visual stability). They're a confirmed ranking factor, and sites passing all three demonstrate better user engagement and conversion rates.
Yes. With 1.5 billion users accessing Google AI Overviews monthly and ChatGPT processing billions of queries, AI search is no longer optional. A modern audit should check AI crawler access, content structure for citation, and schema markup that helps AI systems understand your content.
Whitehat's comprehensive website audit examines over 200 ranking factors across technical SEO, content quality, AI readiness, and competitive positioning.
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