AdSense approval checkers compared, and what to ask of one

Search for an AdSense approval checker, and you get a dozen free tools that take a URL and return a score. They are not equivalent, and the differences that matter are not the ones the landing pages lead with.

Everything below was checked in August 2026 against each tool's own pages. Prices and limits move, so treat the numbers as a snapshot rather than a standing fact, and check before you rely on one.

What is actually on offer

A few of those rows deserve unpacking.

The dedicated checkers are the direct comparison, and the honest summary is that they are quick and shallow. One of the better ones, adsenseeligibilitychecker.org, describes itself as a "comprehensive 54-point website audit" with "50+ policy checks" and "no signup required". That is a reasonable offer for something free and instant. What its page does not say is which pages it reads or what threshold any of the 54 points applies to, and that is the pattern across the category.

The general SEO crawlers are in a different business. Screaming Frog's own pricing page puts the free crawl limit at 500 URLs and a licence at £199 a year. Ahrefs gives Site Audit away free for sites you have verified, at 5,000 crawl credits a month per project. Both are better crawlers than anything in the AdSense-checker category. Neither is scoped to the question, which is worth its own comparison.

The question that separates them

Ask any checker one thing: what threshold did you apply, and to which pages?

A score of 72 out of 100 tells you nothing you can act on. "Fourteen of your fifty pages hold under 150 words of visible text once navigation and footer are stripped" tells you what to open. The first is a number; the second is a task.

This is why our tool pages publish the rule rather than describing it. The thin content checker states the 150 and 100 word marks and where they came from, the duplicate content checker states the similarity threshold and why it is not higher, and the page speed checker says what it is measuring and how that differs from a browser score. You can disagree with a published threshold. You cannot disagree with a score.

The second question is how many pages were read. An eligibility verdict from one page is a verdict about your homepage. Thin content, duplication and publishing cadence are properties of a site, and they are invisible from a single URL.

Where every automated checker stops

No tool in this table, ours included, can tell you whether the content is worth reading. That is the actual bar, and it is the reason sites pass every technical check and are still refused.

What a checker is genuinely good for is removing the reasons that are not about the writing: a missing privacy policy, an ad crawler blocked in robots.txt, pages that return the wrong status code, a certificate about to lapse. Those are mechanical, they are the majority of first-application refusals, and they are the ones you can fix in an afternoon. What the rejection email means by low value content covers the part that is not mechanical.

Google's program policies are the only authority on the bar itself. Every tool here, including this one, is an interpretation of them.

A fair way to choose

If you want a second opinion in ten seconds and nothing more, the free instant checkers do that and cost nothing.

If you already own Ahrefs or Screaming Frog, use them for the technical layer. They are stronger at it than a purpose-built AdSense tool will be, and their reports are more detailed.

If what you want is the specific list of pages and rules standing between you and an approval, use something that reads more than the homepage and tells you the number it applied. That is what our full audit is for, and the checklist of what gets refused outright versus weighed is the same material without running anything.