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 and search results. A rule is included only if every source it needs is one of those six. That leaves 34 of the 86 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: V1, V4

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.

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> shows the overall score, the ten category bars (nine, for the free score), the date it was scored, how many checks were not assessable, and the standing disclaimer. It shows scores only: no per-rule table and no evidence rows. The page is not indexed by search engines.

What the full audit adds

A paid plan runs all 86 rules every billing period for the business you set up in the wizard, and adds:

• Evidence per rule. Every result carries what the check read, the source it came from, and a one-line fix.
• Business Profile, reviews, social, directories and AI visibility. These need the intake details, a Google Places lookup, an optional owner-side connection to your Business Profile, and the citation, social and AI-visibility sources.
• Vertical overrides. Your business type can require, skip or re-weight specific rules.
• The 90-day memo. A prioritised plan of up to eight actions after each scheduled audit; see What the memo contains.
• Deltas and history. Each run is compared with the previous one; the dashboard keeps the trend.
• A shareable, revocable scores-only link. See 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 expires 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.