Real fixes from seven live sites. No pitch.Log in / My reports
Idea to Traffic Pressure Test

Field notes from seven live sites built with AI

Your site passes every check. So why is nobody coming?

We built seven sites with AI in an afternoon each, then spent weeks on the part nobody warns you about: DNS, indexing, ad review and traffic. Check yours free, or see exactly what the full diagnosis finds.

See a real report Read the field notes

Free Site Checker

30 checks in about ten seconds. No signup, no email.

Or run the numbers

The Pressure Test, $14.99

A professional SEO audit for $14.99.

Agencies charge $101 to $750 for an SEO audit, and the tools they use start at $129 a month. Get 60 checks on live SEO data, your top 5 competitors and a step-by-step plan, for one flat $14.99. The data comes from DataForSEO, the provider behind more than 750 SEO software companies and agencies.

SEO agency audit

$101 to $750

per audit

Ahrefs Lite

$129

every month

Semrush SEO plan

$139

every month

Pressure Test

$14.99

once, no subscription

What $14.99 gets you

  • 30 checks on live SEO dataBacklinks, domain rank, Google rankings and estimated search traffic, pulled the moment you run it.
  • Your top 5 competitors, found for youThe sites winning your searches, and exactly where they beat you on links, rank and content.
  • The searches you are missingKeywords your competitors rank for and you do not, with the monthly demand behind them.
  • A verdict you can act onYour biggest constraint, in plain English, with the real numbers behind it.
  • A 30, 60, 90 day to-do listEvery failing check turned into a task, in order, with the target to hit.
  • A printable PDF, saved to your accountDownload it, print it, and tick items off. Open it again any time.
Check my site free, then unlock it How the Pressure Test works

Prices from each company's own pricing page, monthly billing, checked September 2026. Agency range from WebFX's survey of small-business SEO audit prices. The Pressure Test is one report on one site, not a subscription tool.

What the report looks like

Free check on the left. Full report on the right.

Same layout and same scoring. The full report runs the free 30 again, adds 30 checks on live SEO data, and puts all 60 on one page with a plan.

I→TSite CheckerFree
Site
example-site.com
Run
September 27, 2026
100/100

30 of 30 checks passed. Nothing is structurally wrong.

  • Page loads successfully
  • HTTPS with valid certificate
  • Mobile viewport tag
  • Title tag
  • Meta description
  • H1 heading
  • Canonical tag
  • Robots meta tag
  • robots.txt
  • sitemap.xml
  • Content depth
  • Meta charset
  • H2/H3 hierarchy
  • Internal links
  • Structured data (schema.org)
  • Open Graph title
  • Open Graph description
  • Open Graph type
  • Open Graph image
  • Image alt text
  • Twitter Card meta tags
  • Author/byline present
  • Lang attribute on HTML
  • Contact method discoverable
  • Privacy policy linked
  • Favicon present
  • No mixed content
  • Security headers present
  • CSS loads
  • JavaScript loads without errors

What it cannot see: who links to you, who holds the demand, what a visitor is worth.

I→TPressure Test Report$14.99
Site
example-site.com
Run
September 27, 2026
100/100

30 of 30 checks passed. Nothing is holding it back.

  • Referring domains
  • Domain rank
  • Total backlinks
  • Follow-link share
  • Backlink spam score
  • Broken backlinks
  • Keywords ranking in Google
  • Keywords on page one
  • Keywords in the top 3
  • Estimated monthly search traffic
  • Strongest keyword held
  • Ranking trend
  • Referring domains vs competitors
  • Domain rank vs competitors
  • Competitor-only keywords
  • Search demand you are missing
  • Technical score vs competitors
  • Content depth vs competitors
  • Market validation
  • Differentiation
  • Monetization clarity
  • Execution feasibility
  • Audience clarity
  • Time to revenue
  • Published pages
  • Broken pages
  • Internal links per page
  • Outbound citations per page
  • Server response time
  • Rankings per page

Built from live SEO data (links, rankings, competitor keywords), pulled the moment you run it.

Check my site free See a full sample report
What the 30 free checks cover (foundational)
  • Page loads successfully. The server responds with HTTP 200, not 404, 500, or redirect. Without this, nothing else matters.
  • HTTPS with valid certificate. Traffic demands encrypted connections. Browsers flag non-HTTPS sites as insecure.
  • Mobile viewport tag. Without this, phones render the desktop layout. Mobile is 60% of web traffic.
  • Title tag (unique, descriptive). Google uses this as the page headline in search results. Missing or duplicate titles kill CTR.
  • Meta description (under 160 chars). The snippet shown under your title in search. Google ignores it for ranking but uses it for CTR.
  • H1 heading (exactly one). The page's main topic. Search engines weight this heavily. Skip it and you lose topical relevance.
  • Canonical tag (absolute URL). Tells Google which version of the page is the original. Missing this causes duplicate-content issues.
  • Robots meta tag (not noindex). If set to noindex, Google won't index the page. Common mistake on new sites.
  • robots.txt (exists and is valid). Tells crawlers which pages to visit. Broken robots.txt can block your entire site.
  • sitemap.xml (valid XML). Google uses this to find all your pages. Missing sitemap means new pages take weeks to index.
  • Content depth (700+ words on ad pages). Thin content doesn't rank. Google needs enough text to understand what the page is about.
  • Meta charset (UTF-8). Tells browsers how to read the text. Missing this breaks international characters and accents.

The silent ones

Five failures that produced no error message

Every one of these passed the check we were running at the time.

01

A missing file returns 200 OK

Your host answers every unknown path with your homepage. Tools that fetch data pass their own error check and then silently do nothing.

02

A deploy deletes files you did not touch

A Pages deploy replaces the whole site with the folder you pointed at it. Your icons, ads.txt and verification files go with it.

03

www never resolves

Attaching the hostname and creating its DNS record are two separate steps. Six of our sites were missing the second one.

04

The review queue you never joined

Adding a site to AdSense creates a row. It does not submit anything. The status sits there looking like waiting.

05

Cached JavaScript runs after you deploy

The file on the server is correct and the browser runs yesterday's. It looks exactly like a deploy that failed.

Who it is for

Who this is for

You can run a business. You are not a web developer, and you do not want to become one. You watched someone build an app in twenty minutes and thought, reasonably, that you could do that too.

You can. We did. What nobody mentioned is that the build is roughly a fifth of the work, and the other four fifths are unglamorous, poorly documented, and full of failures that produce no error message at all. Not hard, exactly. Just invisible until you are standing in front of them.

So this is not a complaint about AI, which delivered on the part it promised. It is the missing half of the instructions, written down while it was still fresh: what broke, what it cost in hours, and the one command that would have told us sooner.

The checklist

Seven phases from idea to real traffic

Twenty-eight steps, in the order they actually happen. Your ticks are remembered in this browser. Nothing is sent to us, and there is no account.

0 of 28 complete
1. Validate the Idea0 of 4

Before any code: is there actually anyone searching for this, and can you realistically compete?

  • If the top results are 10-year-old sites with thousands of backlinks, that's a real signal, not something an AI-built site beats on day one.

  • "High volume, low competition" is rare. "Decent volume, beatable competition" is the realistic target.

  • Some niches (daily puzzle answers, live scores) need constant updates to rank. Others (a calculator, a converter) are genuinely build-once. Know which one you're building before you start.

  • A quick USPTO or Justia Trademarks search. Putting a trademarked game or product name in your domain is the single strongest predictor of a cease-and-desist letter later.

Read the guides for this stage

2. Build It0 of 4

This is the part AI tools genuinely nail. A few things to get right anyway.

  • A backend and database add real cost and real failure points. If your tool doesn't need to store user data, don't give it a backend just because one is easy to add.

  • AI tools can generate a page that references a stylesheet or data file that never actually got deployed. It'll return a 200 status code and look identical to a real error. The only way to catch it is to look.

  • Layout bugs that only appear at real mobile widths are extremely common and easy to miss testing on desktop.

  • If your only copy of the site lives inside a tool's session, you have no real backup.

Read the guides for this stage

3. Deploy & Get a Domain0 of 4

Getting from "code" to "live at a real address."

  • At-cost registrars run $10-15/year for a .com. Anything wildly cheaper or more expensive is worth a second look.

  • For a client-side tool with no backend, you should be paying $0/month for hosting. If a platform is charging you for this, you're either paying for something you don't need, or your site needs a backend you didn't realize.

  • Most modern platforms handle this automatically, but confirm it. A broken cert makes browsers show a scary warning to every visitor.

  • A file can return "200 OK" while actually serving the wrong content entirely (a broken CSS file silently serving your homepage's HTML instead, for example). Status codes alone don't catch this.

Read the guides for this stage

4. Set Up Monetization0 of 4

The step most guides wave their hands at. See the full deep-dive below for the details.

  • Don't write a policy describing analytics you don't have, or omit one you do. Both create real compliance problems.

  • Not just the homepage. Every page.

  • Thin content is the single most common rejection reason.

  • A fake or malformed ads.txt is treated by Google's crawler as authoritative and can actively hurt you. Don't create the file until you have a real ID to put in it.

Read the guides for this stage

5. Wire Up Analytics & Search Console0 of 4

So you can see what's actually happening, and so Google knows you exist. Full deep-dive below.

  • A tag that's technically on the page but never fires is a common, invisible failure.

  • This is what actually gets your pages considered for indexing at all, and gives you real search-performance data.

  • This is separate from having a sitemap file. It has to actually be submitted, not just exist.

  • If you're already verified in Google Search Console, Bing has a bulk-import feature that skips the whole verification process a second time.

Read the guides for this stage

6. Drive Real Traffic0 of 4

The part that actually takes sustained effort, not a one-time setup.

  • Head terms are usually locked up by sites with 10+ years of authority. Specific, narrow pages ("words with no repeated letters," not just "word finder") face far less competition and still attract real search volume.

  • Directory sites and communities like Reddit specifically detect and penalize automated posting. This step is inherently manual. There's no legitimate shortcut.

  • Lead with the answer to the actual question. Mention your tool second, not first.

  • Real internal linking between genuinely related pages is one of the few SEO levers entirely within your control.

Read the guides for this stage

7. Monitor & Maintain0 of 4

The unglamorous phase every "AI makes this easy" pitch skips entirely.

  • You want to know a site is down before a user tells you, or before you just don't notice.

  • This bug class is real, common, and invisible unless you specifically check for it. A site can silently break for every visitor while returning "success" on every automated check.

  • A backup that's drifted out of date with production isn't a real backup.

  • An expired domain or a silently-expired API token is one of the most avoidable ways to lose a working site.

Read the guides for this stage

Latest

New from the field notes

DeploymentSeptember 27, 2026

My Cloudflare Pages site works on the apex but www does not load

Attaching a hostname to Pages does not create the DNS record. Real NXDOMAIN output, and the two calls that fix it.

MonetizationSeptember 27, 2026

What we changed after a Low value content rejection

Seventeen pages, 4,067 words, and the rule that decided which paragraphs were worth writing.

DeploymentSeptember 27, 2026

New JavaScript is live but the browser runs the old file

A four-hour edge cache on .js and .css, two fixes that do not work, and the one that does.

View all guides

Typical advice, and what we publish instead

The difference is not tone. It is whether the sentence tells you what to type.

Typical adviceIdea to Traffic
“Add quality content”The exact page type that fails, and what we added to it
“Be patient, indexing takes time”The Search Console step that creates an indexing path at all
“Make sure ads.txt exists”The command that shows your host is serving HTML as ads.txt
“Check your site works”Compare a nonsense URL’s hash to your homepage

Who this will and will not help

It will help if you have a site that is live and not working the way you expected, and you are prepared to run a command and read what comes back. Every guide here ends in something checkable rather than something to believe.

It will not help if you want a shortcut to approval or to ranking. Those decisions belong to Google and to your readers, and anyone selling you certainty about either is selling you something we do not have.

Why these are so specific

Because the general version of each of these already exists and did not help us. “Check that your files deployed” is true and useless. The useful version names the command, shows the output it produces when the thing is broken, and says which of two opposite causes you are looking at. That is harder to write and it is the only reason to write it.

Not sure what is holding your site back?

60 checks on live SEO data, your top five competitors found for you, and a 30, 60, 90 day plan to fix what is holding you back. One report, $14.99.

Pressure test my site, $14.99