Free score vs full audit

The free score at /score is a reduced EchoPilot audit of any business website. The full audit is what a paid plan runs every month. This article explains what each one covers, the limits on the free score, and what the full audit adds.

What the free score runs

The free score only uses sources that need no credential from you: the website itself (HTTP responses and HTML), DNS records, regex checks on page text, PageSpeed Insights, search results and a quick AI-visibility check of the homepage by Echorank. A rule is included only if every source it needs is one of those seven. That leaves 40 of the 92 rules, spread over nine categories:

• Website foundation: W1, W2, W3, W4, W5, W7, W8, W9, W11
• Technical SEO: S1 to S6, S8, S9, S10, S11, S13
• Local presence: L12
• Reviews and reputation: R8
• Social media: M1
• Conversion capture: C2, C3, C4, C6, C8
• Content and email: E5, E6
• Analytics and ads: A1
• AI visibility (by Echorank): V1, V4, V5 to V10

Brand consistency has no rule that qualifies, so it does not appear in a free score. The gating checks still run first, exactly as in the full audit. Because there is no intake, the business is treated as type "other", so no vertical overrides apply. Scoring is the same formula as the full audit, computed only over the rules that were assessed; see How scoring works.

AI visibility (by Echorank) in the free score

Each free score asks Echorank, our sister product, for a quick check of the homepage, once per run (never when the page is viewed): which AI crawlers robots.txt lets in (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, OAI-SearchBot and Google-Extended are listed first), whether the text is in the HTML the crawler fetches or only appears after JavaScript runs, structured data, the sitemap, head metadata and heading structure. The result page shows the score and grade of those checks, each crawler as OPEN or BLOCKED, and Echorank's check bars. The quick check does not crawl further pages, so it leaves out Echorank's content signals (About and FAQ pages); the full audit includes them. It tells you what AI crawlers may fetch and can read, not what an AI will answer. See AI visibility (by Echorank).

Limits and caching

• No account. The form asks for the business website and an email address for the result. That is all.
• Three starts per day. Each network address may start three free scores in a rolling 24 hours. A cached result does not count as a start.
• Cached for 7 days. Results are cached per normalised domain (lower-case, without www.) for 7 days. Anyone who enters the same domain in that window sees the same result instead of triggering a new run.
• Public hosts only. The domain must resolve to a public address; anything private, local or otherwise blocked by the same safety rules as the paid intake is refused with a message.
• One to three minutes. The result page polls while the checks run; the page says it usually takes one to three minutes.

The result email

When a new run finishes, one plain-text email goes to the address you entered: the overall score, each category's score, the top three fixes drawn from the rules that failed or were only partly met, and the link to the result page. It is sent once per run and only for a run that completed; if the run fails on our side no email goes out and the page says so instead. A cached hit sends nothing: if the domain was scored in the last 7 days you land on the existing result straight away, and the address you typed is not stored. If the email cannot be delivered, the failure is recorded on the run for the owner to look at and the result page still works. The email itself says how long the result and the address are kept.

What the result page shows

The page at /score/<domain> is a report of the run: a score ring with the pass, partial, fail and not-assessable counts and the scorer's one-line reading; the top three fixes in the same order as the email; one row per category with its score bar and how many of its rules ran, with the categories the free score does not cover shown as locked rows with their rule counts rather than a score; a PageSpeed panel (mobile, lab figures as PageSpeed Insights reports them; desktop, INP and field data are not collected), a DNS and email panel with the SPF, DKIM, DMARC and MX findings, a search and site panel (title, description, sitemap, robots.txt, indexability signal, HTTPS and redirects) and the AI visibility (by Echorank) panel; then every rule that ran with its evidence, source and fix, filterable by result. Every figure comes from the run: nothing that did not run is scored or guessed, and a not-assessable rule keeps its reason. The header offers the share link and a PDF download (/api/score/<domain>/pdf, generated once per run and kept with the cached result for the same 7 days); /score/<domain>/print is the same report in print form. A shared link previews the score card. The page is not indexed by search engines.

Free score vs full audit, side by side

Every value in this table is read from the configuration the product runs on: the free-source allowlist, the rule set, the crawler limits, the plans and the throttles.

The Business Profile, reviews, social, directories and AI answer-check rows need the intake details, business listing data (DataForSEO), an optional owner-side connection to your Business Profile, and the citation, social and AI-visibility sources, which is why they are outside the free score. The memo is described in What the memo contains; the scores-only share link in Sharing a result.

The plans and their prices are on /pricing and in Plans, pricing and the money-back guarantee.

Data kept for a free score

The domain, the email address you entered, the network address used for rate limiting, and the result are stored. The cached result and its generated PDF expire after 7 days; the row holding the address and the network address is deleted after 90 days by the worker's pruning job. What we store covers retention for everything else.