Crawlwise vs squirrelscan

What it is

A single-binary command-line auditor, MIT licensed, with an agent skill for Claude Code and Cursor, a local MCP server and a credit-based cloud. It covers SEO, performance, security, accessibility and what it calls agent experience.

Where squirrelscan is better

This section is the reason to read the page. A comparison that only lists our wins is marketing, and you would know it was.

• The CLI is free and open source, and it crawls locally with no account. Our free tier audits a single page; a site crawl needs a paid plan.
• It runs far more rules: the site lists 297+ across 21 categories, against our roughly seventy checks.
• Its cloud can render pages in a headless browser for JavaScript-heavy sites and SPAs. We read the HTML the server returns, so a client-rendered page looks thin to us.
• It checks llms.txt and LLM parsability as part of its agent-experience rules. We deliberately retired our llms.txt check, so if that file matters to you, they look at it and we do not.
• It fingerprints 385 technologies and writes seven output formats, including a self-contained HTML report.

Where we differ

• We fetch the page as GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and 14 other AI crawlers and report whether each one actually got through, so a CDN or firewall block shows up even when robots.txt allows the crawler.
• We do not reduce a site to a health score or a letter grade. Every finding cites its check, and anything we could not measure is marked not measured rather than counted for or against you.
• Beyond the audit, the paid plans add rank tracking, backlinks, Search Console and GA4 data, local SEO and AI visibility tracking in the same account.
• The entry price is lower: Starter is $4.99 a month, against $19 a month for squirrelscan Pro cloud.

What cannot be compared

• A free local CLI against a hosted service with a credit balance. If you want an auditor inside your terminal and CI at no cost, theirs is the more natural fit.

Judge it yourself without paying either of us

Run the free ai crawler checker on your own site — no account, no credit, no email. Then audit one page, which the trial credit covers, and read the limits page to see what it will not tell you before you spend anything.