Different problems, different tools
Ahrefs Site Audit is the technical SEO module inside the wider Ahrefs SEO suite. It crawls your entire site (often thousands of URLs) and reports on 170+ SEO issues across content quality, internal linking, mobile usability, and indexability. It is excellent at what it does.
ismycodesafe.com is not trying to be a site-wide SEO platform. We are a single-URL dual-purpose scanner: 200+ security checks, 21 SEO checks, and 10 AI search readiness checks - all on the URL you submit, free, in 60 seconds.
What Ahrefs Site Audit does well
- Site-wide crawl: Schedules recurring crawls of every URL on your domain
- Health score: Single number summarising overall technical SEO state
- Backlink-gap context: SEO issues weighted by traffic loss they could cause, using Ahrefs link data
- JavaScript rendering: Full headless browser crawl for SPAs
- Custom segments: Crawl-issue filtering by page type, depth, language
- Integration with rank tracking, keyword research, content explorer
What ismycodesafe.com adds that Ahrefs cannot
Ahrefs Site Audit is purely an SEO tool. It will never tell you:
- Whether your SSL/TLS configuration leaks Heartbleed or CRIME
- Whether your CSP, HSTS, X-Frame-Options headers are configured
- Which OWASP Top 10 categories your site is exposed in
- Whether your detected JavaScript libraries have CVEs
- Whether your .env, .git, or admin paths are publicly accessible
- Whether VirusTotal, PhishTank, Spamhaus, or URLhaus list your URL
- Whether your content is structured for ChatGPT / Perplexity citation
That is not a criticism of Ahrefs. It is a different product category. We are the layer that sits next to it.
AI search: Ahrefs measures mentions, we grade the page
Ahrefs does have an AI-visibility product now. Brand Radar tracks how often a brand shows up across AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot, Gemini, and AI Mode, plus YouTube, TikTok, and Reddit, and shows which sources an answer cited. It is a paid add-on rather than part of a standard plan, listed at 179 EUR/month for selected platforms and 654 EUR/month for all of them.
That answers a different question than the one we answer. Brand Radar is monitoring: is anyone naming us in AI answers right now, and how does that compare to competitors. It is measured at brand level, after the fact, on a subscription.
ismycodesafe.com grades one URL before it ships. The AI Search Readiness grade scores 10 citation signals on the page itself: FAQPage schema, question-format headings, a citation-shaped first paragraph, table count, factual density, authority-link reciprocity, paragraph length discipline, and freshness signals. It tells you whether the page is built to be quotable, not whether a model quoted you last month.
If you are running a brand at scale, those two are complements: Brand Radar shows where you are absent, a page-level grade shows why. If you are shipping a landing page next Tuesday, only the second one is actionable, and it is free.
How a single-URL scan compares to a full-domain crawl
Ahrefs Site Audit's crawler is built for scale: point it at a domain, and it queues every discoverable URL, renders JavaScript-heavy pages in a headless browser, and checks each one against 170+ SEO rules - broken links, duplicate titles, orphan pages, redirect chains, thin content, and more. That is the right tool when you need to know whether page 4,000 of a 10,000-page site has a canonical tag pointing at the wrong URL.
ismycodesafe.com takes the opposite shape: one URL, one request, three grades back in about 60 seconds. There is no crawl queue, no scheduling, and no site-wide dashboard - by design. The tradeoff is that we cannot tell you which pages on your domain are duplicates of each other, but we can tell you, on the one page you care about right now, whether the SSL certificate is about to expire, whether the CSP header is missing, and whether the content would get cited by an AI Overview.
Use Ahrefs to find where the site-wide problems are. Use ismycodesafe.com to decide whether the specific page you are about to launch is safe to ship.
How to test Ahrefs Site Audit without paying $129/month
Most people searching for a way to test Ahrefs Site Audit are trying to answer one question before spending anything: is this worth a subscription. There is a free route, and Ahrefs does not hide it.
Ahrefs Webmaster Tools gives free access to Site Audit with 5,000 crawl credits per month per project. The catch is verification: you can only audit websites you have verified ownership of, so a free account cannot crawl a competitor. Analysing unverified sites is what the paid plans are for.
A realistic test run looks like this:
- Sign up for Ahrefs Webmaster Tools and verify the domain, usually via Google Search Console or a DNS record
- Start a Site Audit crawl and let it finish before judging anything - partial crawls skew the health score badly on larger sites
- Read the issue list by severity, not by count. Errors on indexability and redirects matter; a warning about a missing meta description on a paginated archive usually does not
- Check whether 5,000 credits per month actually covers your site. A 400-page site re-crawled weekly will run out
What the test run will not show you, on any tier, is security posture. Crawl the same domain and Site Audit will report title tags and redirect chains while staying silent about the exposed .git directory, the TLS 1.0 fallback, or the jQuery version with a published CVE. That is not a gap in their product, it is the product boundary.
So the honest way to test both: run the Ahrefs crawl on the domain, then paste one important URL from that same domain into ismycodesafe.com. You get an SEO grade you can sanity-check against theirs, plus a Security grade and an AI Search Readiness grade they do not produce. No account, no credits.
Image audits: what each tool reports
Image auditing is a common reason to open Site Audit, and it is one place where Ahrefs is clearly the deeper tool. Their crawler treats images as a first-class issue category and reports:
- Broken images: image files returning 4xx or 5xx across the crawled site
- Missing alt text: with images classified as content, decorative, or tracking, so a tracking pixel is not flagged, plus bulk alt-text generation through Patches
- Oversized images: flagged from the base file, which is worth knowing because a server that optimises on delivery can make the warning look worse than what users download
ismycodesafe.com is narrower here, and it is better to say so than to imply parity. On the single URL you submit we check alt-attribute coverage and report the share of images missing it, escalating severity once more than half lack alt text, and we check total page weight and compression. We do not crawl a site for broken image files, and we do not write alt text for you.
If your job this week is fixing images across a few thousand URLs, use Site Audit. If your question is whether one page is accessible, fast, safe, and quotable, that is the scan we run.
Pricing reality
Ahrefs: Lite tier $129/mo (limited crawl), Standard $249/mo, Advanced $449/mo, Enterprise $1,499/mo. Site Audit is included but not separately purchasable.
ismycodesafe.com: Free unlimited single-URL scans (all three grades visible). $49 one-off for premium PDF with detailed per-finding fixes. $25/mo subscription auto-re-scans the URL every 30 days. No annual contract.
When to use both
If you already pay Ahrefs:
- Run Ahrefs Site Audit weekly across the full domain to catch site-wide drift
- Run ismycodesafe.com on each new landing page before deploy to catch security gaps and AI readiness issues Ahrefs does not test
If you do not pay Ahrefs:
- Run ismycodesafe.com on every URL that matters (homepage, key landing pages, top blog posts)
- Use the three grades to prioritise: a low Security grade is a ship-blocker; a low AI Search grade is a growth gap
The honest summary
Ahrefs Site Audit is the right tool inside the Ahrefs suite for site-wide technical SEO. Outside that suite, the price is hard to justify for a small team.
ismycodesafe.com is the right tool for free single-URL multi-axis scanning. Three grades, one request, no signup. We do not compete with Ahrefs on backlinks or keywords - we add the security and AI-citation layers Ahrefs does not have.
For the security methodology behind the Security grade - reconnaissance, transport security, headers, and access control - see the Web App Security Testing Guide. If you are weighing us against a desktop crawler instead of a hosted SEO suite, see our Screaming Frog comparison.
Ahrefs Site Audit vs ismycodesafe.com - FAQ
- Does Ahrefs do security scanning?
- No. Ahrefs Site Audit is a technical SEO tool - it checks for broken links, redirect chains, duplicate content, missing meta tags, and site-wide crawl health. It does not check SSL/TLS configuration, security headers (CSP, HSTS, X-Frame-Options), CVE exposure, OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities, malware flags, or AI search readiness. Those checks require a dedicated security scanner.
- Is ismycodesafe.com a free Ahrefs Site Audit alternative?
- For single-URL scanning that includes security and AI readiness, yes. ismycodesafe.com is free and requires no account. However, it is not a replacement for Ahrefs if you need site-wide crawling across thousands of URLs, backlink analysis, keyword research, or historical rank tracking. The tools solve different problems - ismycodesafe.com adds the security and GEO layers Ahrefs does not provide.
- What does ismycodesafe.com check that Ahrefs cannot?
- ismycodesafe.com checks 200+ security issues (OWASP Top 10, CVE detection via NVD and OSV, SSL/TLS depth via SSLyze, DNS security records, 53 sensitive file paths, Shodan port exposure, VirusTotal malware flags) and 10 AI Search Readiness signals (FAQPage schema, citation-shaped headings, factual density, freshness). None of these are available in any Ahrefs tier.
- Can I use ismycodesafe.com alongside Ahrefs?
- Yes. If you already use Ahrefs, run ismycodesafe.com on new landing pages before deploy to catch security gaps and AI readiness issues that Ahrefs does not surface. Use Ahrefs for site-wide SEO health and backlink strategy; use ismycodesafe.com for the per-URL security-plus-GEO layer. The tools are complementary, not competing.
- How do I test Ahrefs Site Audit on my own site for free?
- Sign up for Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, which gives free access to Site Audit with 5,000 crawl credits per month per project. You must verify ownership of the domain, so the free tier can only audit your own sites and not competitors. Verify, run a full crawl, and read the issues by severity rather than by count. To check the same URL for security posture and AI search readiness, which Site Audit does not test on any tier, paste it into ismycodesafe.com. Free, no account required.
- Does Ahrefs Site Audit check images?
- Yes, and thoroughly. Images are one of its issue categories: it reports image files returning 4xx or 5xx as broken, flags missing alt text with images classified as content, decorative, or tracking so tracking pixels are not falsely flagged, offers bulk alt-text generation through Patches, and warns on oversized images based on the base file size. ismycodesafe.com is narrower: on the single URL you submit we report the share of images missing an alt attribute and check total page weight and compression. We do not crawl for broken images site-wide or generate alt text. For image work at scale, Site Audit is the better tool.
- Does Ahrefs track AI search visibility?
- Yes, through Brand Radar, a paid add-on rather than a standard plan feature. It tracks how often a brand appears across AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot, Gemini, and AI Mode, plus YouTube, TikTok, and Reddit, and shows which sources an AI answer cited. It is listed at 179 EUR/month for selected platforms and 654 EUR/month for all of them. It measures brand mentions after they happen. ismycodesafe.com does something different and smaller: it grades one URL on 10 page-level citation signals before publication, so you can fix the page rather than only observe the outcome.
- Is a single-URL scan as useful as a full-site crawl?
- For different questions, yes. A full-site crawl (Ahrefs) answers 'where on my domain are the SEO problems?' - useful for auditing an existing site with hundreds of pages. A single-URL scan (ismycodesafe.com) answers 'is this specific page safe and optimized to ship?' - useful right before a deploy, or when evaluating one landing page rather than an entire domain. Most teams need both at different points in the release cycle.