Short answer
The automated part is quick: crawling a small business website takes minutes. Checking what the crawl found, ruling out false alarms and turning it into a fix list in the right order is what takes the time, and that depends on the size of the site and how deep the audit goes.The crawl: minutes
An audit starts with software visiting your pages the way a search engine does: following links, recording status codes, titles, headings, speed and structured data. For a site with tens of pages that is quick. For a site with thousands it takes longer, mostly because there is more to look at afterwards.
The review: where the time goes
Raw output needs a person. Tools flag things that look wrong but aren't, and some problems only show up when someone reads the pages. We learned this on our own data: our broken-link figure dropped from 9.8% of sites to 5.8% once we stopped counting links that a site's firewall refused to our checker but that work fine for visitors (the correction is here). Telling those apart is the slow, valuable part.
The write-up: short, and in order
A useful audit ends with a short list in plain English: what is wrong, why it matters, and what to fix first. If you receive a long document with no order to it, the thinking hasn't been done yet.
Seeing results takes longer than the audit
Fixes only count once Google has crawled the corrected pages, and Google says crawling “can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks” (Google Search Central). So judge an audit by whether its fixes were right, checked again a few weeks later, not by how fast the report arrived.
Our first check is free: send your web address using the form below.