I Ran 20+ Free Website Audits. Here's What I Found.

A while back I put up a reel offering free website audits. People commented, I went through their sites one by one. Thirteen real businesses, spread across India, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and Kenya. A Dubai appliance-repair shop. A Bihar makhana farm. A Saudi industrial-safety company. An audiology clinic in Pietermaritzburg. Different countries, different trades, different budgets.

I expected the problems to be all over the place. They were not. The same small set of mistakes showed up again and again, no matter who built the site or where the business was. This post is everything I found, first-hand, from real sites. You will not find this data in some recycled listicle, because nobody else ran these audits. I did.

Here are the numbers before the detail:

• More than half were clearly built with an AI tool.
• Three had the exact same broken mobile menu.
• Several local businesses had only their homepage indexed on Google. One had only its contact page indexed, with the homepage missing entirely.
• Two were running on a free website builder's subdomain they did not even own.
• One store advertised "1.2 million smiles" at the top of the page and had zero reviews on any product.

A quick note on method before the detail: I went through each site by hand on both desktop and mobile, ran Google PageSpeed, checked meta tags, headings, schema and indexing with a browser SEO extension, and looked at Google Business Profiles where relevant. It is the same website audit I run for paying clients, just condensed. I have kept every business anonymous. The point is the patterns, not calling anyone out.

1. The AI-built website is everywhere now, and it takes about five seconds to spot

More than half the sites were clearly made with an AI tool. A Vadodara interior studio on Lovable. A cab company in Uttarakhand. A makhana store in Bihar. And, best of all, a Chennai web design studio that had built its own site on AI.

The tells are always the same. Em dashes scattered through the copy. That stacked, punchy fragment style where every line is a two-word sentence. Generic phrasing that could belong to any business in any industry. And a design that looks polished at a glance but has no actual decisions behind it.

The Chennai one bothered me the most, because they sell web design for a living. If your own copy reads like a machine wrote it, a sharp client is going to wonder whether your builds are machine-made too. AI tools got everyone to a site that looks finished. They did not get anyone to a site that feels considered. For a business selling trust, food, repairs, design, that hollow feeling costs real money.

2. Broken mobile menus. So many broken mobile menus.

This is the one that genuinely surprised me. Three separate sites had the exact same bug: tap the hamburger, a menu drops down from the top, covers half the screen, and then refuses to close when you tap outside it. On a couple of them the page kept scrolling behind the open menu, so you could scroll the whole site with a giant menu stuck over the top half of your screen.

Every one of these was built on an AI tool or a template, and not one had been tested on an actual phone. Which is wild, because most of these businesses get most of their traffic on mobile. The menu is the first thing a visitor touches. If it feels broken, everything after it is fighting uphill.

3. The "one long page" trap is killing local businesses in search

Several local businesses had gorgeous, long homepages with every service laid out as a section. And when I checked Google, only the homepage was indexed. Nothing else.

An audiology clinic in South Africa listed eight services, hearing tests, tinnitus care, wax removal, all as sections on a single page. One page indexed. A doorstep phone-repair service in Bangalore had two pages indexed, total. Here is why that matters: when someone searches "hearing test" plus their city, or "phone screen repair near me," Google has nothing to show them, because a section inside a page cannot rank on its own. Each real service needs to be its own page with its own title.

This was the biggest search mistake I saw, and almost nobody had it right. These businesses are invisible for the exact searches their customers are typing.

4. Websites built on borrowed land

A Hyderabad hardware shop's entire website was a free subdomain from a site builder, complete with a "get your free website" badge at the bottom advertising the tool that made it. An interior studio was running on a lovable.app address. A cab company had chosen a .cab domain instead of a plain .com.

None of these businesses own their address. They cannot rank properly, and to anyone who reads the URL, the whole thing looks temporary. The hardware shop was the saddest case. Its homepage had a "Proven Success in Numbers" box proudly displaying 0.00 stars and zero happy customers, while the same business had a 4.9 rating and thirteen warm, specific reviews sitting on Google. The free tool took a thriving local shop and made it look dead on arrival.

5. Reviews collected, then left to rot

My favourite catch of the whole batch: a Shopify home-decor store with a banner across the top reading "1.2 Million Smiles and Counting," and not a single review on any product page. Not one. They even had a review app installed and sitting idle.

That gap is worse than saying nothing. A huge number with zero visible proof makes people doubt the number. If you really have 1.2 million happy customers, where are they?

Elsewhere I found a business replying to every Google review with the same copy-pasted message, tiny edits aside, which makes genuine engagement read as automated. And an audiology clinic that buried its patient reviews right at the bottom of the page, below everything, where almost no one scrolls. Reviews are the cheapest way to lift conversions, and business after business had them switched off, hidden, or faked-looking.

6. Telling Google absolutely nothing

A UAE furniture and fit-out company had a page title and a meta description that were both just the owner's name. No mention of furniture, joinery, fit-out, or the three cities they serve. Those two lines are what Google shows in search results, and they were handing over dead weight.

The audiology clinic had no meta description at all. The Shopify store's collection pages, its main money pages for search, had no intro text and no descriptions. And a local repair business had no Google Business Profile, which for a "near me" service is close to not existing. This stuff is free and takes minutes, and it kept getting skipped.

7. Ecommerce checkouts that fight the customer

A makhana store in Bihar made you create an account and log in before you could place an order. You could add things to your cart, but the moment you tried to actually buy, it stopped you and demanded a registration. Forcing an account before checkout is one of the most reliable ways to lose a first-time buyer, and it is well documented. On mobile, the same store hid the cart inside the hamburger menu, with no cart icon on the bar at all.

For a store, the buying flow is the one thing you cannot get wrong. These got it wrong at the last step, after doing everything else to bring the customer in.

8. Design that reads like a blog

A handful of sites had no visual hierarchy whatsoever. Every section the same size, the same weight, stacked one after another, so the page reads like a long article instead of a business trying to sell something. A South African clinic and a UAE fit-out company both had this. Real photos, decent content, but nothing that leads your eye to what matters or points you toward the thing you are meant to do next. A website is not a document. It is supposed to move someone toward an action.

The thing that ties all of this together

Here is what stuck with me after thirteen audits. Almost every one of these businesses is real, and most of them are good at what they do. The hardware shop with the 4.9 rating. The makhana farm with proper FSSAI and APEDA certifications. The furniture company with genuine, beautiful projects. The websites are the weak link, not the businesses behind them.

And the gap has grown since AI made it trivial to spin up something that looks like a website in an afternoon. That is the trap. Looking like a website and doing the job of a website are two very different things. A site that looks done but forces a login, hides its reviews, cannot be found on Google, and breaks on a phone is not helping the business. It is just sitting there.

If you run a small business, here is the short list

Own your domain. Do not build your livelihood on a free subdomain you cannot control.

Give every real service or product its own page, so Google and your customers can actually find it.

Set up your Google Business Profile and keep it active. For a local business this is not optional.

Test everything on a real phone, especially the menu and the checkout.

Show your reviews, and show them near the top.

Write your own title and description for every page. Do not leave it to the template.

If you sell online, let people buy without creating an account.

And write like a human. People can smell AI copy now, and it makes you look smaller than you are.

None of this is exotic. It is the boring, unglamorous stuff that separates a website that earns from a website that just exists. 20+ sites in, that is the clearest thing I learned.

Want to know which of these your site has?

That is exactly what a website audit is for. I go through your site by hand, the same way I went through these thirteen, on desktop and mobile, and give you a plain-English report: what is costing you customers, why, and what to fix first. No jargon, no automated score dump, just the real problems in order of what matters.

Get a website audit and I will take a look.