Solo dev builds a free internal-linking grader, learns SEO lessons
A launched crawlmouse.com six weeks ago, a free tool that crawls a website and grades its from A to F. It flags (pages nothing links to), pages buried too many clicks deep, and weak hub pages. Users paste a URL, the tool crawls the live site, and returns a grade plus a list of fixes — no signup or installation required.
The motivation was that established crawlers like Screaming Frog and Sitebulb are powerful s with a learning curve, too much setup just to answer one simple question about . The tool reads the raw HTML a server returns, which means it shows exactly what AI crawlers like GPTBot see, since none of them execute JavaScript. A site can look fine visually while being largely invisible to a system like ChatGPT.
The developer then applied standard SEO practices to the tool's own site as a test: 12 blog posts, , and a clean technical setup, submitted to Google and Bing. After three weeks, all 22 pages were indexed and ChatGPT began accurately describing and citing the site.
Key points
- crawlmouse.com is a free tool that crawls a site and grades A through F
- Detects , pages buried too deep, and weak hub pages
- Just paste a URL — results in about two minutes, no signup or install
- Reads raw HTML, showing exactly what non-JavaScript AI crawlers like GPTBot see
- After adding 12 blog posts and to its own site, all 22 pages got indexed and ChatGPT began citing it within 3 weeks