Under the hood: how ScanMySEO works

An audit should leave you with less to figure out.

I kept seeing the same gap: someone receives a detailed SEO audit, then has to work out what deserves attention, who can fix it and how to tell whether the work helped. I don’t think you should need to become a technical SEO specialist to understand your own website.

So the idea behind ScanMySEO is bigger than a better list of issues. An audit should be the start of an increasingly useful understanding of the website something that helps you make a decision and follow it through. The report matters. I just don’t think it should be where that understanding stops.

Under the hood there’s quite a lot going on, but the idea is simple: Cozmo visits public pages, keeps the evidence behind its findings and connects them to the pages they came from. From there, we can explain the same result in ways that help you use it. The How ScanMySEO works page covers getting started; here I want to explain why we’ve built it this way.

First, be clear about what we’re looking at.

Cozmo starts with your public website address, the page allowance for the scan and the ways it can discover pages. A sitemap can help it find more addresses alongside the links on your site. That gives the crawl a clear scope.

We keep finding a URL and successfully reading it separate because they tell us different things. A page might be linked from somewhere but unavailable when Cozmo tries to open it. And even a page we can read may not provide everything a particular check needs.

That distinction sounds small. It isn’t. I’d rather show you that Cozmo couldn’t establish something than give you a cleaner-looking report built on an assumption. Missing information is one of the things we deliberately keep visible.

Finding something is the start. Deciding what to do is the useful bit.

A response code tells us what came back. A finding explains the condition a check identified. A recommendation takes it one step further: what you might inspect or change. I think the audit should do more of that connecting work, rather than leave all of it to you.

The Website Health Score has a related job: compress a complicated audit into a useful sense of where the site stands and where attention is concentrated. It’s ScanMySEO’s summary and prioritisation aid, based on the checks and evidence available to that audit not a Google metric or a ranking forecast. The underlying findings still matter. See Google Search's guidance on third-party SEO tools.

When a result surprises you, open the page and look at what triggered it. The content-quality false-positive guide shows why context can change what you choose to do about a warning.

We built the AI on top of the crawl, not in place of it.

We could put AI right at the front of the process. We deliberately start with what the website actually returned. Cozmo captures that first; AI can then help make sense of it, explain it differently or bring together context you’d otherwise spend time piecing together yourself.

These features depend on your account and the material available for review; the full audit checklist and your account show the current scope. The core report remains useful on its own. AI can make mistakes, so check its interpretation before acting on it. You still decide what gets changed.

There are things an audit simply can’t know.

An audit is a record of what could be checked at a particular time. It gives you a much better starting point, but it can’t see pages it couldn’t reach or private settings it wasn’t given access to. It also can’t tell you that fixing a warning will cause a ranking or revenue change.

Keep the same distinction with AI: it can help you think through a report, but an answer can be incomplete or wrong. And the direction we’re describing here isn’t a claim that each crawl automatically trains a model or produces representative industry benchmarks. Those would need their own data and methods. The aim is useful context you can question, not certainty you’re asked to take on trust.

This is where we’ve got to. It isn’t where we want to stop.

What we’re gradually building underneath ScanMySEO is a better model of the website: its pages, the relationships between them, the signals they expose, the patterns that repeat and, over time, how those things change. By “model” I mean a more connected picture of the site not just a longer list of page checks.

We’re not pretending we’re all the way there today. But that direction influences the choices we make now. Keeping the original evidence means we can explain it differently without changing the facts. Recording a later crawl separately gives us something to compare. Looking across pages gives us a starting point for investigating shared causes rather than just counting symptoms.

The long-term opportunity is bigger than producing a better list of SEO issues. It’s giving you a system that can understand the website, explain what matters, help turn that into action and come back later to see what changed. The reports and conversations are useful today. Together, they’re groundwork for that larger idea.

For all the machinery underneath, your part should feel simple.

There’s quite a lot of engineering behind making that look simple. That’s intentional. You shouldn’t have to care how many states, checks or report transformations sit underneath it. The experience we’re aiming for is much shorter:

1. Give Cozmo the website.Start with its public address. Cozmo works through the pages it can check.
2. Understand what matters.Look at the findings and affected pages, then choose something worth acting on.
3. Get it to the right person and fix it.Use the report or a conversation with Cozmo to help explain the work.
4. Check it again.Try the intended journey and use a later crawl to compare what changed.

For more help with the booking-link example, the broken-links guide explains how to choose an appropriate fix.

There’s plenty more I want Cozmo to understand. But the direction is fairly simple. Every time we make the system better at understanding the website, connecting what it finds and explaining what matters, there should be a little less work left for you on the other side of the report. That’s the product I want ScanMySEO to become.