What it is.
Shiyam Sunder, Slate's co-founder and CEO, published this as a template you duplicate into your own Google Sheets or Notion workspace. The eight steps cover crawlability and indexing, site performance, on-page elements, content quality against intent, internal linking, schema and redirects, AI citation readiness, then analytics validation.
It writes the Core Web Vitals thresholds out: LCP at 2.5 seconds or under, INP at 200 milliseconds or under, CLS at 0.1 or under. That saves the usual argument about what counts as good.
This is Slate's own guide and Slate sells the platform named inside it. The audit steps stand up on Search Console and PageSpeed Insights alone.
What you get.
- Eight audit steps in order, each with what to check and what counts as a pass.
- Core Web Vitals thresholds written out: 2.5 seconds LCP, 200 milliseconds INP, 0.1 CLS.
- An AI citation readiness step, which audit templates written a few years ago predate.
- A prioritization model scoring impact, effort, business importance, and ownership.
- A structure you duplicate into Google Sheets or Notion and assign due dates inside.
How to set it up.
Duplicate the template into your own Google Sheets or Notion workspace before you start filling it.
Run step one against Search Console's Pages report, so indexing problems surface before you spend time on content.
Pull field data from PageSpeed Insights and score each page template against 2.5 seconds LCP, 200 milliseconds INP, and 0.1 CLS.
Check schema with Google's Rich Results Test on one page per template, since errors repeat across a template.
Score every finding on impact, effort, business importance, and ownership, then sort by that score.
Assign an owner and a due date to each row, because an unassigned audit is a document nobody opens.
Use cases
Audit with a pass mark
Work the eight steps and record what counts as a pass on each.
Settle a speed target
Use the stated thresholds when someone asks how fast is fast enough.
Check citation readiness
Run the AI-readiness step on the pages you want assistants to quote.
Best for
Inheriting a site
New in the seat with no idea what is broken. Eight steps in a set order beats poking at whatever the last agency flagged.
Asking for engineering time
Impact and effort scores against named thresholds is the format a sprint planning meeting accepts.
Adding AI readiness to an old checklist
The seventh step covers citation readiness, which older audit templates leave out.