About Stackra and FAQs

No. AI never visits your website or connects to it in any way.

Stackra's own crawler, built on a stealth browser, visits your site and collects data (screenshots, page content, performance metrics, HTML structure), then packages all of that into a structured evidence bundle. The AI models only ever see that bundle. They never fetch your URL, never make requests to your server, and never interact with your live site.

This has a practical benefit too: because our crawler uses the same stealth techniques as a regular browser, it won't be flagged or blocked differently than a normal visitor. AI web crawlers, by contrast, are commonly blocked by bot protection systems like Cloudflare.

Analysis runs across several layers in parallel:

Performance and Core Web Vitals: LCP, INP, CLS, FCP, and TTFB via Google PageSpeed Insights with simulated network throttling.

SEO signals: meta tags, heading structure, keyword usage, internal linking, structured data (JSON-LD), robots.txt, and content freshness across up to 20 crawled pages.

Content quality: sentence clarity, scannability, heading hierarchy, word count, and content depth, evaluated using NNGroup-backed web content standards.

Visual design: desktop and mobile screenshots of your homepage are analyzed to assess CTA visibility, hero message clarity, social proof placement, and trust signal quality.

Trust and conversion signals: forms, CTAs, contact information, testimonials, certifications, and pricing signals.

Technology stack: detected frameworks, analytics tools, CDN, security headers, and HTTPS configuration (200+ pattern library).

Accessibility: WCAG compliance issues via Google PageSpeed Insights' accessibility audit, including ARIA, contrast, and keyboard navigation.

Your score is built on three pillars, each weighted by business impact: Conversion & Trust (35%), Search Visibility (35%), and Technical Confidence (30%).

Each pillar blends two inputs: 70% deterministic signals (measured data such as page speed, heading structure, security headers, and internal link count) and 30% AI expert judgment (the CMO, SEO Expert, and CTO persona scores). This anchors scores to real evidence while still capturing nuance that raw metrics miss.

Scoring also adapts to your business type. Stackra detects whether your site is an e-commerce store, SaaS product, local service, media publisher, and more, across 20 categories mapped to 16 scored profiles. Benchmarks and thresholds shift accordingly, so a local landscaping company isn't penalized for not having a product checkout flow.

Conversion & Trust: trust signals, forms, CTAs, social proof, visual design, hero clarity, and homepage conversion fitness.

Search Visibility: SEO fundamentals, content fitness, Core Web Vitals, structured data, internal linking, and indexability.

Technical Confidence: Performance (via Google PageSpeed Insights), accessibility, security headers, mobile experience, and tech stack health.

We use Google PageSpeed Insights API directly, which means your scores run on the same infrastructure as pagespeed.web.dev. Both desktop and mobile are measured in parallel.

PageSpeed Insights uses Lighthouse with simulated throttling (the Lantern model) -- a mathematical model that predicts performance under typical network conditions (Slow 4G for mobile, broadband for desktop) rather than actually throttling the connection. This produces consistent, reproducible scores.

Small variations can still occur between Stackra and a manual PageSpeed Insights check. CDN edge caching, A/B tests on your site, and transient server-side differences can all cause minor fluctuations between runs. If your scores differ by more than 10 points, it is worth checking whether your CDN caches differently by user agent or request origin.

Three AI experts each review your site from a different lens, score their domain, and generate specific recommendations. Their scores contribute to the three scoring pillars:

CMO (Conversion & Trust): Evaluates marketing effectiveness, conversion paths, trust signals, brand clarity, and visual design quality. Looks at your site the way a growth-focused marketing leader would.

SEO Expert (Search Visibility): Analyzes on-page SEO, content strategy, keyword targeting, technical crawlability, and discoverability. Grounded in current Google Search guidance and ranking research.

CTO (Technical Confidence): Reviews performance, security posture, accessibility compliance, mobile experience, and the quality of your technology choices.

Each persona's score is anchored to the deterministic signals collected during the crawl, so AI judgment can't drift far from what your site actually measures.

Stackra detects what kind of business your website represents (SaaS, e-commerce, local service, professional services, media, non-profit, and more) and adjusts benchmarks and recommendations accordingly.

For example: an e-commerce site is evaluated on product discovery, checkout trust, and pricing clarity. A local service business is evaluated on contact accessibility, geographic signals, and trust indicators like reviews. A SaaS site is evaluated on trial/demo CTAs, feature clarity, and pricing page quality.

This means your score reflects how well your site performs for your type of business, not against a generic one-size-fits-all standard.