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FocalScore vs other website checkers

If you are choosing a tool to tell you what is wrong with your website, the honest answer is that several of the alternatives are good, and that they are not all answering the same question. Here is what each one is for, where FocalScore is the better use of your money, and where it plainly is not.

One tool at a time

Side-by-side pages for 6 alternatives, each with a table, what the other tool does better, and who should choose which. The other tool's facts were read on its own website, and the date is on each page.

Lighthouse, Screaming Frog and Ahrefs

Those tools each answer one question well, and none of them answers the one that decides whether a website earns money. Lighthouse scores the speed and accessibility of a single page. Screaming Frog crawls technical SEO. Ahrefs tracks keywords and backlinks. None of them tells you whether your homepage explains what you actually sell, whether a buyer would trust you enough to enquire, or whether ChatGPT can describe your business correctly when someone asks it for a recommendation.

FocalScore runs 395 checks across all three — convert, rank, and AI readiness — and writes every finding for the person who owns the site rather than the analyst reading it. It also measures AI visibility rather than guessing at it: the paid report puts real buyer questions to an assistant and records whether you were cited, and who was cited instead. And when a check cannot gather its evidence it says “not run” instead of inventing a verdict, so nothing in your report is made up.

The graders, and what happened when we ran them on ourselves

In September 2026 we ran nine website checkers against our own homepage — SEO Site Checkup, Rank Math, DebugBear, HubSpot Website Grader, Seobility, Yoast, Moz, Sitechecker and Semrush — and read a tenth, GTmetrix, from its own published sample report. Two things came out of that.

First, they found real defects on our site, and we fixed them: a canonical tag pointing at http:// on an https:// page, a missing favicon, a page title at 68 characters that search results were cutting off, and a colour-contrast failure on a pricing badge measured at 2.49:1 where 4.5:1 is the standard. A checker that finds something you missed has earned its place, whoever built it.

Second, we mapped 296 check rows from eight of those tools onto the 264 checks we ran at the time. Eighty of ours are run properly somewhere in the field; 118 land in the same territory as a competitor row that stops short of the question we ask; and 66 had no comparable row anywhere in the 296. Conversion and Trust account for much of that gap — 52 checks, 22% of your FocalScore grade, matched by exactly one row across all eight tools.

Where FocalScore is not the better choice

Three jobs we are not built for. Each of them needs a research index of the whole web, and we do not run one — the free scan runs on measurements and free data sources so that the same site scores the same way every time. The paid report reads a one-time snapshot of your Google positions and the sites linking to you from a data provider, but a snapshot is not a research tool.

If one of those is the question you actually need answered, a tool built on such an index — Ahrefs, Moz or Semrush — is the right purchase, and we would rather say so than sell you a scan that cannot do it.

There is one more limit worth knowing before you scan. FocalScore reads up to 25 pages of a site. That is enough to grade a small-business site and to show you the pattern of what is wrong across it, but it is not a full crawl: if you need every URL on a large site enumerated, that is what a dedicated crawler like Screaming Frog is built for.

The honest way to compare

Run the free scan, then run whichever of the tools above you were considering — on the same page, on the same day. That is exactly what we did to write this page, and it is why the list of defects above is a list of our own. Nothing here needs an account or a card to get your score.

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