The tools are fine. The question they leave open is not.
Site owners already have Search Console, Lighthouse, a security scanner, an SEO suite, an uptime monitor and analytics. Each is good at the job it was built for. None of them answers the question a customer, a Googlebot or an AI assistant answers every day:
What does this site look like from the outside this week — and is it getting better or worse?
We are the weekly reading, not another specialist.
Those products go deeper on their native jobs than Sixvitals ever will. That is the point. Depth on one vital, on an irregular cadence, with a different sample each time, cannot produce a trend an owner can trust. Sixvitals is the instrument you run so that, seven days from now, you can tell whether the site an outsider sees got better, worse, or quietly broke after a deploy.
If you need keyword research, buy Ahrefs or Semrush. If you need to debug a slow template, use Lighthouse. If you need to know whether Google indexed a URL, open Search Console. Keep the stack. Add the reading.
- Google Search Console
- Owns: Index truth, queries, field Core Web Vitals, Google’s crawl errors.
Cannot be: An outside view of AI crawlers, headers, pixels, or schema versus visible content. Not a weekly reading by design. - Lighthouse / PageSpeed / Calibre
- Owns: Lab performance, SEO and best-practices checks of one URL. Developer-grade diagnostics.
Cannot be: A site-level health score. Not AI access, security posture across pages, or measurement presence. No week-over-week. - SecurityHeaders / Observatory / SSL Labs
- Owns: Header grade and TLS configuration, on demand.
Cannot be: A site-level score across vitals, or a trend. Partner-ready only if someone remembers to re-run them. - Screaming Frog / Sitebulb
- Owns: Full-site technical crawl, scheduled by an operator when licensed for it.
Cannot be: Owner-readable. Cross-vital consequence. Anything a crawler cannot see: real-browser timings, pixels firing, security headers as a grade. - Ahrefs / Semrush
- Owns: Keywords, links, competitors, large-site audits. Their site audits re-crawl on a schedule and list new and fixed issues.
Cannot be: Cheap, focused, or outside-in across six vitals. “Site health %” is search issues; it is not security, measurement or data integrity, and it is not one card an owner reads. - GA4, Tag Manager, pixels
- Owns: Behaviour after a visit. The owner’s own numbers.
Cannot be: What a stranger’s browser, a bot, or a payment reviewer sees before anyone logs in. Whether the tag itself is on the page. - Uptime / Pingdom / Oh Dear
- Owns: Whether the host answered, right now.
Cannot be: Whether the page that answered is findable, honest, fast enough, or measurable. - AEO / GEO trackers
- Owns: Whether assistants mention the brand for chosen prompts.
Cannot be: Whether the site tells GPTBot to stay out, whether llms.txt exists, or whether the product data contradicts the page.
Six vitals. Seven tools. One column filled on every row.
Every cell is worded so the vendor would agree with it. A dash means the tool does not attempt it. Amber is a partial answer.
| Vitalwhat Sixvitals reads | Search ConsoleGoogle’s own data | Lighthouse / PageSpeedone URL, in a lab | Security scannersSecurityHeaders, Observatory | SEO suitesAhrefs, Semrush, Screaming Frog | Uptime monitorsPingdom, UptimeRobot | GA4 / pixelsyour own numbers | Sixvitalsoutside-in, weekly |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Can customers find you?Search · indexability, canonicals, sitemaps, titles, descriptions | Google’s own index. The truth. | one page’s SEO checks | — | deep, scheduled | — | — | a sample of your pages, the same ones each weekweekly |
| Can AI assistants recommend you?AI visibility · are ten AI crawlers allowed in; llms.txt; how the business is described to machines | — | — | — | brand mentions in answers (some) | — | — | crawler access, llms.txt, machine-readable business descriptionweekly |
| Would a bank or a partner trust your site?Security · encryption, browser safeguards, cookie handling, leaked versions | — | best-practices, one page | headers and TLS, on demand | HTTPS only | certificate expiry (some) | — | the checks a reviewer runs first, on every sampled pageweekly |
| Is it fast enough to keep the sale?Performance · first response, largest paint, layout shift, weight, requests, phone viewport | field Core Web Vitals | one page, lab, on demand | — | partial | response time | — | a real browser, median of three loads, home page and a key pageweekly |
| Do the facts match?Data integrity · price, stock, rating and dates as told to machines vs as shown to people; duplicates; thin pages | rich-result errors | — | — | duplicates, thin pages | — | — | machine data checked against the visible pageweekly |
| Can you see your customers?Measurement · analytics, tag manager, pixels, consent, conversion events on the wire | — | — | — | — | — | reports what fires; silent when it doesn’t | is the tag on the page, does it fire on the pages that sellweekly |
| Cadence | Google’s | when you run it | when you run it | scheduled crawl | every minute | continuous | every 7 days, same instrument |
| Written for | SEO | developers | security | SEO teams | ops | marketers | the owner (consequence) and the developer (cause) |
One score an owner will actually watch
Specialist tools produce specialist numbers. Owners respond to one score and six grades framed as consequence. Unweighted mean; A from 80, F below 35; every number reproducible from measured evidence.
A change log, not another first audit
Fixed means the finding was present last run, is gone now, and the check could run this run. Regressed means a new measured finding of medium severity or above. A vital that moves under three points is not a story. None of that is possible if last week’s instrument was a different crawler.
Six vitals that decide the outside view
AI visibility here is crawler access and llms.txt, not a prompt tracker and not Search Console. Data integrity is whether the stock and price told to machines match the page. Measurement from the outside is whether the pixel is even there. No other widely used tool treats those six as one rubric, scored the same way, every week.
The same ruler, stamped, every seven days
Even-interval sample, never random. Engine version on every run. Robots respected, one request in flight per host. When the browser fails, the affected checks are marked unmeasurable rather than “fixed”. Without that discipline week-to-week movement is noise, and owners correctly stop trusting the number.
What Sixvitals will never claim.
Those limits are how the score stays honest.
- We will not out-crawl Screaming Frog on a 200,000-URL catalogue.
- We will not replace Search Console as the source of truth for Google indexation.
- We will not tell you which keyword to write next.
- We will not tell you whether ChatGPT recommended the brand for a prompt. That is a different product.
- We will not declare the site “secure” because headers improved. Security here is partner-review readiness, not a penetration test.
- We will not audit anything behind a login, a payment or a captcha.
Sixvitals exists so that an owner can look at one card, every week, and know whether the site the rest of the internet sees got healthier — and hand a short, evidenced list to whoever has to fix it.