How Stackra Works: Scoring, Reports, and Reviews

The free plan gives you a complete scan: your Growth Readiness Score, the full multi-page crawl (up to 20 pages), AI expert reviews from all three personas, the prioritized action plan, evidence and how-to for every finding, industry benchmarks, AI search visibility signals, and scan history. You get 3 scans per month at no cost, with no credit card.

Paid plans (Starter and Pro) add higher scan limits, Google Search Console and Analytics data plus Bing Webmaster Tools data alongside your report, a page-by-page Google index status check, change tracking between scans, report sharing, and PDF export. Keyword and SERP data and competitor comparison are in development for paid plans.

See the pricing page for the full comparison.

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, pricing signals, and Google Business Profile presence.

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.

Yes, on Starter and Pro plans. Once you connect your Google account in Settings, Stackra pulls in your real Search Console data: the queries people are actually searching to find your site, page rankings, and click-through rates. Google Analytics 4 traffic data is also available alongside your scan results.

You can also connect your Microsoft Bing Webmaster Tools account the same way. Stackra requests read-only access (the Webmaster.read scope) to your verified Bing sites and their search performance, so you can see Bing clicks, impressions, and average position next to your Google data.

This sits next to your scan report so you can see what the crawler found and what Google's own data says about actual performance, in one place. The connection uses Google's official OAuth flow and Stackra only requests read-only access to Search Console and Analytics.

One thing worth knowing: Stackra reads your web search performance (queries, pages, clicks, impressions, and position). There are parts of Search Console it does not pull, and a few that Google does not expose to any tool at all.

What Stackra does not currently pull (Google offers it, we focus elsewhere for now):

• Discover traffic. For some sites this is a major channel, and right now we report zero of it. It is the biggest blind spot in the integration.
• Image, Video, and News search performance.
• Search appearance breakdowns, including rich-result and AI Overview appearance types.

What no tool can pull, because Google has no API for it:

• The Links report (top linking sites, top linked pages, and anchor text).
• Crawl stats, Manual Actions, and Security Issues.
• Page Indexing and Coverage aggregate trends. Google only exposes indexing status one URL at a time, capped around 2,000 checks per day, so there is no bulk version of that report.
• Core Web Vitals and other Enhancement reports. That data comes from Google's CrUX dataset, not the Search Console API. Stackra already pulls Core Web Vitals separately through PageSpeed Insights.

Semrush and Ahrefs are professional SEO platforms built for agencies and in-house SEO teams. Both are strong for keyword research, backlink analysis, and rank tracking, and both include a site audit module. That audit output is a list of technical crawl issues, not a scored report, and neither tool covers conversion signals, visual design, or trust factors. Starting cost is around $129 to $139 per month.

Moz covers similar ground: keyword research, link analysis, crawl reports, and its well-known Domain Authority metric. Like Semrush and Ahrefs, it is built for SEO practitioners and produces issue lists rather than a scored, prioritized fix plan.

HubSpot Website Grader is the most direct comparison to Stackra. Free, fast, gives a score across four categories (Performance, SEO, Mobile, Security). No AI expert reviews, no business-type-aware benchmarks, no conversion and trust scoring, and no action plan ranked by impact and effort. Good for a 30-second check; Stackra is for when you want to know exactly what to fix and why.

The short version: Semrush, Ahrefs, and Moz are power tools for SEO professionals. If you have an in-house SEO team or an SEO agency handling your site, those tools are worth it. If you are the person running the website and you want a plain-English scored report with a ranked to-do list you can actually act on, that is what Stackra is built for.

For a full side-by-side breakdown of six widely used audit tools, see the comparison guide.