---
name: audit-website
description: Audit websites for SEO, technical, content, and security issues using squirrelscan CLI. Returns LLM-optimized reports with health scores, broken links, meta tag analysis, and actionable recommendations. Use when analyzing websites, debugging SEO issues, or checking site health.
license: See LICENSE file in repository root
compatibility: Requires squirrel CLI installed and accessible in PATH
metadata:
  author: squirrelscan
  version: "1.7"
allowed-tools: Bash(squirrel:*)
---

# 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**: Leaked secrets, 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, hyphens, keywords
- **Keywords**: Keyword stuffing 
- **Content**: Content structure, headings
- **Images**: Alt text, color contrast, image size, image format
- **Local SEO**: NAP consistency, geo metadata
- **Video**: VideoObject schema, accessibility

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, accessibility, 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:

```bash
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:

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

### Windows Installation

Install using PowerShell:

```powershell
irm https://squirrelscan.com/install.ps1 | iex
```

This will:
- Download the latest release binary
- Install to `%LOCALAPPDATA%\squirrel\`
- Add squirrel to your PATH

If using Command Prompt, you may need to restart your terminal for PATH changes to take effect.

### Verify Installation

Check that squirrel is installed and accessible:

```bash
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:

```bash
squirrel init --project-name my-project
```

or config:

```bash
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:

```bash
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

```bash
# 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:

```bash
squirrel audit https://example.com --max-pages 200
```

Force fresh crawl (ignore cache):

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

Resume interrupted crawl:

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

Verbose output for debugging:

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

## Common Options

### Audit Command Options

| Option | Alias | Description | Default |
|--------|-------|-------------|---------|
| `--format <fmt>` | `-f <fmt>` | Output format: console, text, json, html, markdown, llm | console |
| `--max-pages <n>` | `-m <n>` | Maximum pages to crawl (max 500) | 500 |
| `--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 <fmt>` | `-f <fmt>` | Output format: console, text, json, html, markdown, xml, llm |

## 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`:

```bash
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 with LLM Output

```bash
# User asks: "Check squirrelscan.com for SEO issues"
squirrel audit https://squirrelscan.com --format llm
```

### Example 2: Deep Audit for Large Site

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

### Example 3: Fresh Audit After Changes

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

### Example 4: Two-Step Workflow (Reuse Previous Audit)

```bash
# First run an audit
squirrel audit https://example.com
# Note the audit ID from output (e.g., "a1b2c3d4")

# Later, export in different format
squirrel report a1b2c3d4 --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:

```bash
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:

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

### Invalid URL

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

```bash
# ✗ 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`
