Most "free website audits" score your SEO. This one drives a real browser through your page and reports what's broken — links, forms, analytics, console errors, layout at phone size.
No signup, no card. We load your public page in a fresh anonymous browser — public pages only, and the report is unlisted by default.
In our June 2026 audit of 49 Show HN launches, 78% had at least one critical finding on launch day — none of which shows until a real browser actually loads the page.
It's the second one — and that's the gap. Search "free website audit" and you get SEO scanners: meta tags, keyword density, backlink counts. Useful, but they read your HTML and grade it. None of them clicks anything. None notices that your signup button 404s, that no analytics event ever fired, that a third-party script throws on load, or that the layout overflows the screen on a phone.
Prufa audits the other half: does the page actually work when a real visitor loads it. It's the side a crawler can't see — the same ground covered by the pre-launch QA checklist, ordered by what actually breaks. The mechanism is deliberate. An LLM-backed agent plans and drives a real browser — it acts, observes, and navigates the way a person would. A separate plain-code harness owns the browser session, records all network traffic, and runs fixed, deterministic checks against the captured evidence. The LLM navigates; it never grades the result — same URL in, same verdict out. That separation is what makes a machine verdict something you can trust instead of a guess.
You get the same engine that powers paid monitoring — the free audit runs its public-page subset.
Three steps, no script to write: paste a URL, a real browser drives the page, and deterministic checks grade the evidence it captured.
No account, no card. Anonymous, rate-limited per IP. The audit loads only the public page you point it at.
A fresh, isolated browser session loads the page the way a new visitor would, capturing every network request, console message, cookie, response code, and the rendered DOM — including a second pass at phone size (390×844).
Deterministic checks grade the captured evidence into six sections (Works, Fast, Found, Measured, Accessible, Compliant) plus an ungraded Flows view. Machine-checked facts are marked Verified; the agent's opinions are shown separately and labeled Advisory — they never move a grade.
Want to run the same audit automatically? Wire it into a coding agent with the QA MCP server, call it from code or CI with the website testing API, or from a terminal with the CLI.
These mirror the shapes the public-page audit produces — page-health findings, not signup or checkout flows, which a free public-page audit cannot walk. Verified and Advisory tiers never interleave.
Severity counts and section grades come from Verified findings only. Advisory observations are excluded from every count — we don't pad a score with opinions. There is no 0–100 composite score; you get per-section A–F grades and plain-language headlines.
No. Prufa opens your public URL in a fresh anonymous browser session, the way a first-time visitor would. It records network requests, console output, cookies, response codes, and the rendered DOM — not your users' inputs, not their sessions. The audit only touches public pages.
No. Reports are unlisted by default behind a share token (/r/<token>)
and carry a noindex tag, so they don't show up in search. Only someone with the
link can open it. You also get a 7-day re-check by email and read-only report
access via the API and the JSON report.
No — and where SEO tools win, we say so. A crawler reads your HTML; an SEO scanner grades it. They're genuinely better at keyword and backlink analysis. Prufa runs the page in a real browser and machine-verifies behavior a crawler can't see: did the tag actually fire on the network, did the layout hold at phone size, did the console stay clean. Run both — they answer different questions.
No. A black-box functional audit can flag the blast-radius layer (missing
security headers, cookies without Secure), but it cannot see a key
hardcoded in your client bundle or git history — that needs a dedicated secret
scanner. We're explicit about this in
our
write-up on exposed secrets.
The questions people ask before they paste a URL — answered straight, with our own data.
A functional QA audit. Most free website audits — and tools like PageSpeed, Lighthouse, and Semrush — score SEO, performance, or keywords. Prufa instead loads your page in a real browser and checks whether it works: broken links, dead forms, missing analytics, console errors, and layout breakage at phone size. It does grade SEO basics (canonical, titles, Open Graph) in its "Found" section, but the point is behavior, not a keyword score. Run both — they answer different questions.
Paste your URL into the audit box on this page and submit — no signup, no card. A real browser loads the page in under ~90 seconds, records every network request, console error, and response code, then deterministic checks grade what it captured. You get a shareable report listing verified problems (machine-checked facts) and advisory observations (clearly labeled opinions). The audit covers public pages only.
The captured evidence is graded across six sections: Works (UX, forms, mobile), Fast (performance), Found (SEO, AEO), Measured (analytics/tracking), Accessible (a11y), and Compliant (consent, compliance, security), plus an ungraded Flows view. Common findings from our June 2026 audit of 49 Show HN launches: no analytics events (38 of 49), missing canonical (24), and cookies set without the Secure flag (22).
No. The audit endpoint is anonymous — paste a URL and run it, no account and no payment instrument. It's rate-limited per IP and reruns of the same URL reuse the existing report. The free tier also includes a 7-day re-check by email, a shareable HTML and JSON report, and read-only report API access. Paid monitoring tiers are card-first; the one-shot audit never is.
Paste your URL. Under ~90 seconds, no signup, no card. You'll see exactly what's broken — and a shareable report you can hand to whoever needs to fix it.