# Reading a site audit by severity

> netweft sorts every audit finding as critical, warning or info. What sits in each band, the thresholds behind borderline ones, and the order to fix them.

Source: https://netweft.com/blog/reading-an-audit-by-severity
Updated: 2026-10-15

**Work critical first: server errors, broken internal links, missing titles and pages the crawler was blocked from. Warnings hold most of the ranking work, from duplicate titles to thin content and orphan pages. Info findings are often deliberate. A 403 or 429 means the crawl was refused, not that a page is broken.**

An audit that returns four hundred findings of equal weight is a backlog nobody
starts. netweft gives every finding one of three severities, so the list has a
top. There are 25 kinds of finding: 4 critical, 12 warnings and 9 info.

## Critical: fix this week

These stop pages being crawled, indexed or reached at all.

- **Server error.** The page returned a 5xx. Search engines that keep seeing
  these crawl the site less.
- **Broken internal link.** A link on your own site points at a URL that
  errors. It wastes [crawl budget](/glossary/crawl-budget) and strands
  visitors.
- **Missing title tag.** The strongest on-page relevance signal is absent.
- **Crawler was blocked.** The site answered with a bot challenge or an access
  denial instead of the page.

That last one deserves a note. When the site answers 401, 403, 429 or 503,
netweft reports that the crawl was refused rather than counting it as a page
fault, because those codes are about the crawler, not about your SEO. The fix
is to let the `netweft-audit` user agent through your bot protection and run
the audit again. If Google meets the same wall, though, the finding is real.

## Warning: this is where the ranking work is

Twelve kinds, and most audits are mostly warnings:

- duplicate titles, duplicate meta descriptions and duplicate content
- a missing h1 or a missing meta description
- [conflicting canonicals](/glossary/canonical-url): a page that is indexable
  while its canonical points elsewhere
- pages that return a 4xx, redirect chains of more than one hop
- orphan pages nothing links to, images without alt text
- thin content, under 200 words of visible text
- slow responses, over 1,500 milliseconds before the server answers

Duplicates usually come in groups, and a group is usually one template. Before
fixing forty pages, read [auditing by template](/blog/auditing-by-template).

## Info: read, then decide

Nine kinds that are often deliberate:

- titles under 30 or over 60 characters, meta descriptions under 70 or over
  160
- more than one h1, heading levels that skip a step
- pages more than four clicks from the home page
- pages that link nowhere
- pages set to noindex

A noindex page is the clearest example. It is fine if somebody meant it and a
silent loss of traffic if nobody did. The audit cannot know which, so it tells
you and lets you decide.

## Every finding says how to fix it

Each finding carries an explanation and a fix in plain words, from the same
registry the API returns, so the dashboard, an export and an agent reading
`list_audit_issues` over [MCP](/blog/an-agents-first-calls) all describe it
identically.

## The crawl's manners

The crawler identifies itself as `netweft-audit`, respects
[robots.txt](/glossary/robots-txt), and costs 1 credit a
page. A Pro audit crawls up to 1,000
pages and Pro runs 60 audits a month;
Agency runs 300 audits of up to
5,000 pages. Running the audit after every significant deploy is an
affordable habit, which is the point of making it cheap.