audit-website

# Website Audit Skill

Audit websites for SEO, technical, content, performance and security issues using the squirrelscan cli.

squirrelscan provides a cli tool squirrel - available for macos, windows and linux. It carries out extensive website auditing
by emulating a browser, search crawler, and analyzing the website's structure and content against over 140+ rules.

It will provide you a list of issues as well as suggestions on how to fix them.

## Links

* squirrelscan website is at [https://squirrelscan.com](https://squirrelscan.com)
* documentation (including rule references) are at [docs.squirrelscan.com](https://docs.squirrelscan.com)

You can look up the docs for any rule with this template:

https://docs.squirrelscan.com/rules/{rule_category}/{rule_id}

example:

https://docs.squirrelscan.com/rules/links/external-links

## What This Skill Does

This skill enables AI agents to audit websites for over 140 rules in 20 categories, including:

- **SEO issues**: Meta tags, titles, descriptions, canonical URLs, Open Graph tags
- **Technical problems**: Broken links, redirect chains, page speed, mobile-friendliness
- **Performance**: Page load time, resource usage, caching
- **Content quality**: Heading structure, image alt text, content analysis
- **Security**: HTTPS usage, security headers, mixed content
- **Accessibility**: Alt text, color contrast, keyboard navigation
- **Usability**: Form validation, error handling, user flow
- **Links**: Checks for broken internal and external links
- **E-E-A-T**: Expertise, Experience, Authority, Trustworthiness
- **User Experience**: User flow, error handling, form validation
- **Mobile**: Checks for mobile-friendliness, responsive design, touch-friendly elements
- **Crawlability**: Checks for crawlability, robots.txt, sitemap.xml and more
- **Schema**: Schema.org markup, structured data, rich snippets
- **Legal**: Compliance with legal requirements, privacy policies, terms of service
- **Social**: Open graph, twitter cards and validating schemas, snippets etc.
- **Url Structure**: Length, hypehns, keywords
- **Keywords**: Keyword stuffing
- **Content**: Content structure, headings
- **Images**: Alt text, color contrast, image size, image format
- **Local SEO**: NAP consistency, geo metadata
- **Mobile**: VideoObject schema, accessability

and more!

The audit crawls the website, analyzes each page against audit rules, and returns a comprehensive report with:
- Overall health score (0-100)
- Category breakdowns (core SEO, technical SEO, content, security)
- Specific issues with affected URLs
- Broken link detection
- Actionable recommendations

## When to Use

Use this skill when you need to:
- Analyze a website's health
- Debug technical SEO issues
- Fix all of the issues mentioned above
- Check for broken links
- Validate meta tags and structured data
- Generate site audit reports
- Compare site health before/after changes
- Improve website performance, accessability, SEO, security and more.

## Prerequisites

This skill requires the squirrel CLI to be installed and available in your PATH.

### Installation

If squirrel is not already installed, you can install it using:

curl -fsSL https://squirrelscan.com/install | bash

This will:
- Download the latest release binary
- Install to ~/.local/share/squirrel/releases/{version}/
- Create a symlink at ~/.local/bin/squirrel
- Initialize settings at ~/.squirrel/settings.json

If ~/.local/bin is not in your PATH, add it to your shell configuration:

export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"

### Verify Installation

Check that squirrel is installed and accessible:

squirrel --version

## Setup

Running squirrel init will setup a squirrel.toml file for configuration in the current directory.

Each project should have a squirrel project name for the database - by default this is the name of the
website you audit - but you can set it yourself so that you can place all audits for a project in one database

You do this either on init with:

squirrel init --project-name my-project

or config:

squirrel config set project.name my-project

The project name is used to identify the project in the database and is used to generate the database name.

It is stored in ~/.squirrel/projects/<project-name>

## Usage

### Intro

There are three processes that you can run and they're all cached in the local project database:

- crawl - subcommand to run a crawl or refresh, continue a crawl
- analyze - subcommand to analyze the crawl results
- report - subcommand to generate a report in desired format (llm, text, console, html etc.)

the 'audit' command is a wrapper around these three processes and runs them sequentially:

squirrel audit https://example.com --format llm

YOU SHOULD always prefer format option llm - it was made for you and provides an exhaustive and compact output format.

### Setup

If the user doesn't provide a website to audit - extrapolate the possibilities in the local directory and checking environment variables (ie. linked vercel projects, references in memory or the code).

If the directory you're running for provides for a method to run or restart a local dev server - run the audit against that.

If you have more than one option on a website to audit that you discover - prompt the user to choose which one to audit.

If there is no website - either local, or on the web to discover to audit, then ask the user which URL they would like to audit.

You should PREFER to audit live websites - only there do we get a TRUE representation of the website and performance or rendering issuers.

If you have both local and live websites to audit, prompt the user to choose which one to audit and SUGGEST they choose live.

You can apply fixes from an audit on the live site against the local code.

### Basic Workflow

The audit process is two steps:

1. **Run the audit** (saves to database, shows console output)
2. **Export report** in desired format

# Step 1: Run audit (default: console output)
squirrel audit https://example.com

# Step 2: Export as LLM format
squirrel report <audit-id> --format llm

### Advanced Options

Audit more pages:

squirrel audit https://example.com --maxPages 200

Force fresh crawl (ignore cache):

squirrel audit https://example.com --refresh

Resume interrupted crawl:

squirrel audit https://example.com --resume

Verbose output for debugging:

squirrel audit https://example.com --verbose

## Common Options

### Audit Command Options

| Option | Alias | Description | Default |
|--------|-------|-------------|---------|
| --maxPages <n> | -m <n> | Maximum pages to crawl (max 500) | 50 |
| --refresh | -r | Ignore cache, fetch all pages fresh | false |
| --resume | - | Resume interrupted crawl | false |
| --verbose | -v | Verbose output | false |
| --debug | - | Debug logging | false |

### Report Command Options

| Option | Alias | Description |
|--------|-------|-------------|
| --format llm | -f llm | Export in LLM-optimized format |
| --format xml | -f xml | Export in verbose XML format |
| --format json | -f json | Export in JSON format |

## Output Formats

### Console Output (default)

The audit command shows human-readable console output by default with colored output and progress indicators.

### LLM Format

To get LLM-optimized output, use the report command with --format llm:

squirrel report <audit-id> --format llm

The LLM format is a compact XML/text hybrid optimized for token efficiency (40% smaller than verbose XML):

- **Summary**: Overall health score and key metrics
- **Issues by Category**: Grouped by audit rule category (core SEO, technical, content, security)
- **Broken Links**: List of broken external and internal links
- **Recommendations**: Prioritized action items with fix suggestions

See [OUTPUT-FORMAT.md](references/OUTPUT-FORMAT.md) for detailed format specification.

## Examples

### Example 1: Quick Site Audit

# User asks: "Check squirrelscan.com for SEO issues"
squirrel audit https://squirrelscan.com
# Returns audit ID, e.g., "sqrl_abc123"

# Then export in LLM format
squirrel report sqrl_abc123 --format llm

### Example 2: Deep Audit for Large Site

# User asks: "Do a thorough audit of my blog with up to 500 pages"
squirrel audit https://myblog.com --maxPages 500
squirrel report sqrl_xyz789 --format llm

### Example 3: Fresh Audit After Changes

# User asks: "Re-audit the site and ignore cached results"
squirrel audit https://example.com --refresh
squirrel report sqrl_def456 --format llm

### Example 4: One-Line Workflow

# Audit and immediately export in LLM format
AUDIT_ID=$(squirrel audit https://example.com --quiet | tail -1) && squirrel report $AUDIT_ID --format llm

## Troubleshooting

### squirrel command not found

If you see this error, squirrel is not installed or not in your PATH.

**Solution:**
1. Install squirrel: curl -fsSL https://squirrelscan.com/install | bash
2. Add to PATH: export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"
3. Verify: squirrel --version

### Permission denied

If squirrel is not executable:

chmod +x ~/.local/bin/squirrel

### Crawl timeout or slow performance

For very large sites, the audit may take several minutes. Use --verbose to see progress:

squirrel audit https://example.com --format llm --verbose

### Invalid URL

Ensure the URL includes the protocol (http:// or https://):

# ✗ Wrong
squirrel audit example.com

# ✓ Correct
squirrel audit https://example.com

## How It Works

1. **Crawl**: Discovers and fetches pages starting from the base URL
2. **Analyze**: Runs audit rules on each page
3. **External Links**: Checks external links for availability
4. **Report**: Generates LLM-optimized report with findings

The audit is stored in a local database and can be retrieved later with squirrel report commands.

## Additional Resources

- **Output Format Reference**: [OUTPUT-FORMAT.md](references/OUTPUT-FORMAT.md)
- **squirrelscan Documentation**: https://docs.squirrelscan.com
- **CLI Help**: squirrel audit --help`