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What the free scan includes
The free scan runs a real audit against any site you point it at, with no login and no account. It does ask for an email address before it starts. The report itself opens in your browser as soon as the scan finishes, so there is nothing to wait on in your inbox. It is also intentionally narrower than a connected workspace, and this page says exactly where that line sits so nothing surprises you when you look at the results.
What it finds
A free scan crawls the site, joins that crawl with live keyword ranking data, and runs the same detectors a connected audit does. It finds the structural and SEO leaks those sources support, names which of the five issue patterns explains each one, and lays the whole map out so you can see where visitors fall out. It has no traffic data to draw on, because it never asks for Search Console or GA4 access; the patterns that depend on those sources stay dark on a free scan the same way they would on any connected site that hasn't linked them yet.
What it does not include
A free scan finds the leaks and names the pattern behind each one. It does not write the fix. Public scans run the audit pipeline with brief generation explicitly turned off, so there is no written action brief, no evidence trail, and no recovery estimate behind any finding, only the finding itself. That is a deliberate limit on public, unauthenticated scans, not a bug: generating a brief costs real compute per page, and running that for every anonymous URL submitted would be an open door.
What a connected workspace adds
Connecting your own site turns every one of those bare findings into a full action brief: the written fix, the evidence behind it, and an estimate of the traffic it would recover, each carrying its own confidence rating. A connected workspace also adds the three patterns a public scan cannot reach without Search Console and GA4 access, and, on the Full tier, the BigQuery-measured journey-edge map covered on the Connecting your data page.