Site optimization

It starts with a crawl

PicoRank crawls your site — following links from the homepage and any sitemap, staying inside your domain (and inside its path, for outlets) — and stores what it finds: content, headings, metadata, links, response codes. Pages that need JavaScript to render are re-fetched in a real browser, so a client-rendered site is not reported as empty.

How many pages we crawl is set by your plan. If a crawl hits that ceiling the app says so rather than implying the site was fully covered.

Then the analysis

Findings are grouped: technical health, on-page content, internal linking, and how well your pages match what you are trying to rank for. Each finding names the pages affected, with a link to each.

Suggestions are generated, then critiqued and revised before you see them — a first draft of "improve your content" is not worth reading. Findings that cannot be supported by the evidence collected are dropped rather than softened.

Evidence, and what we will not claim

An audit that guesses is worse than one that says less. So:

• Findings need a minimum of evidence before they are raised at all.
• If the crawl was incomplete, the analysis says it is running in a degraded mode instead of presenting partial results as complete.
• Facts about your business — your name, what you sell — come from your site, not from inference. We would rather say nothing than confidently invent an identity.

What to do first

Findings are ranked by likely impact, not by count. Twelve missing alt attributes on a page nobody visits matter less than one broken canonical on your best-converting page. Work down the list.

Dismiss anything that does not apply — a deliberate choice you have already made, a page that is meant to be thin. Dismissals persist across runs, so the same non-issue does not resurface every week.

Re-running

Analyses run on a schedule set by your plan, and can be triggered manually. Since the analysis reads the stored crawl, re-analysing after fixing things only tells you something new if you crawl again first — the app offers "new crawl and analysis" for that.

Reports

Any analysis can be exported as PDF, DOCX, XLSX or Markdown — the full set of findings and affected pages, suitable for handing to whoever will do the work. Which formats you can download depends on your plan.