Most free audits are a lead magnet with a score on top. You get a number out of 100, a few red badges, and a calendar link. The Spryxa audit is built to be the starting brief for the crew, so it has to be specific enough to act on. Here is what is inside it and why each layer is there.
How it runs
You give it a URL. The audit crawls your public site, so there is nothing to install and no tag to add. It runs 23 analysis types across the pages it can reach and returns the results to your workspace. There is no sales call between you and the findings.
Connecting Google Analytics 4 or Google Search Console afterwards makes some sections sharper, because the crew can weigh a finding by real traffic instead of by page structure alone. It is optional for the first read.
Layer 1: usability, scored against Nielsen's heuristics
The audit scores the site against all 10 of Jakob Nielsen's usability heuristics: visibility of system status, match with the real world, user control, consistency, error prevention, recognition over recall, flexibility, minimalist design, error recovery, and help.
Why does a growth audit care about heuristics? Because conversion problems are usually usability problems wearing a marketing costume. A pricing page that makes visitors remember plan details from the previous screen is a recall problem. A demo form that wipes every field on one validation error is an error recovery problem. Both cost pipeline, and both are cheap to fix once someone names the exact element.
That is the rule for this layer: every finding names the element and the reason, not just a grade.
Layer 2: technical SEO
Thirteen technical SEO checks cover the foundations that decide whether search engines can find, read and trust your pages: title tags, meta descriptions, canonical links, noindex directives, the language and mobile viewport declarations, H1 headings, image alt text, and structured data. None of this is glamorous. All of it is table stakes before content or links can pay off.
These findings go to the Website Crew for the site-level fixes and to the Search Crew where the fix depends on search intent.
Layer 3: Core Web Vitals
Speed is judged against Google's published thresholds, not against a vendor's own scale:
- Largest Contentful Paint: good is 2.5 seconds or less.
- Interaction to Next Paint: good is 200 milliseconds or less.
- Cumulative Layout Shift: good is 0.1 or less.
- First Contentful Paint and Time to First Byte are reported alongside, as diagnostics.
A slow landing page taxes every paid click you send to it. That is why performance findings sit in the same report as conversion findings: they are the same problem viewed from two sides.
Layer 4: accessibility
The accessibility score is a 0 to 100 number from axe-core, weighted by severity. We say this every time it appears: it is a fast signal, not a WCAG compliance certificate. It will catch missing alt text, low-contrast buttons and unlabeled form fields. It will not replace a proper accessibility review if you are subject to one.
For growth, the practical point is that the same issues that block assistive technology often block everyone else. An unlabeled form field confuses a screen reader and a distracted buyer on a phone.
Layer 5: search position and AI answer visibility
The audit looks at what you rank for, what you are close to ranking for, and where competitors take the query. Spryxa also tracks whether AI assistants cite you when a buyer asks your category question, by asking a set of tracked prompts on ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity on a schedule. Free includes five tracked prompts, and paid plans track more.
Some buyers now build a shortlist from an AI answer rather than a results page. If you are missing from the answer, the rest of the funnel never gets a chance.
What Free shows, and what it holds back
We are upfront about this. The full audit has 17 sections, and which ones you see in full depends on your plan. On Free, seven are locked until a paid plan: market research, content gaps, AI visibility, content bias, information architecture, UI, and usability. You still get a real read on the rest, and the locked sections are labelled, not hidden. Free is also one seat and one active outcome, and on Free you approve everything and nothing publishes.
Where each finding goes
This is the part that makes the audit different from the report you got from your last agency pitch. Every finding maps to the crew that fixes it:
- Site speed, broken elements, conversion drift: Website Crew (Nova), which writes the fix. Low-risk fixes can ship inside guardrails. Visual or risky changes are staged for your review.
- Search gaps and AI visibility: Search Crew (Vega), which writes a search brief and, where the evidence supports it, a concrete site fix.
- Weak value proposition or thin pages: Content Crew (Lyra), with Brand Crew (Iris) checking voice and claims.
- Baseline for measurement: Measurement Crew (Echo), which keeps the before-state so a shipped fix can be compared against it.
How to read your audit
Resist the urge to fix everything. Sort findings by where they sit in the buyer path. Anything on the homepage, pricing page, demo or contact flow, and your top paid landing pages goes first. Then look for findings that repeat across templates, because one template fix can clear dozens of pages. Leave the cosmetic items for later.
Then pick one outcome. Not ten. One outcome with a clear before-state is how you find out whether the crew is worth keeping.
Get the baseline for your own site. No install, no call, results in your workspace. Run your free Spryxa audit.