ReachKit vs DebugBear

What DebugBear does better

It checks whether the page is reachable, not just whether it is well-written. DebugBear's checker validates that search engines can index the site and that robots.txt is not blocking important pages from being crawled, alongside the ordinary on-page work — heading structure and nesting, document title and meta description, image alt attributes, language settings, canonical URL and Open Graph tags. ReachKit reads the HTML it is served and reports on it; it does not check robots.txt, and it does not tell you the page is invisible because something upstream said so. That is a real gap in ReachKit's direction, and it is the kind that makes every other score meaningless when it bites.

It also checks something nobody else on this page does. Under "Check that AI agents can use your site", DebugBear validates your llms.txt file, audits the accessibility tree — its own reason being that AI agents use the accessibility tree to understand your page — and shows the WebMCP commands available for agents to interact with it. ReachKit does none of that.

And the checker sits inside a performance product. The page links a Core Web Vitals test and states that Google uses Core Web Vitals as ranking factors; the surrounding tooling is a website speed test, Lighthouse score monitoring, a TTFB test, an INP debugger, an HTML size analyser, real-user and synthetic monitoring, and uptime monitoring, with continuous website monitoring — scheduled tests and alerts — as the paid offering. ReachKit measures no page speed, no Core Web Vitals and no uptime. If your problem is that the site got slower last Thursday, DebugBear is built to catch it and ReachKit will never notice.

Where it leaves a solo founder stranded

The checker grades one page against best practice, in isolation. That is the shared limit of the bracket, but it lands differently here because DebugBear's centre of gravity is engineering: it will tell you the page is technically sound, crawlable and fast, and it has no way to tell you whether being technically sound is what stands between you and a customer. It does not know what you sell, which searches your buyers run, or who is currently taking them.

The second thing a founder should notice is what the page does not say. It names no price, no plan and no trial length — the route past the free check is a Start Free Trial button, and you find out what continuous monitoring costs after you have signed up for it. That is normal for the category and it is not a scandal; it is just a fact worth knowing before you budget around it.

The third is that fixing a page is iterative and this is a page-level tool inside a monitoring product. There is nothing here that turns eight findings into an order of work.

What ReachKit does instead

ReachKit measures 8 on-page signals — page title, meta description, heading structure, content depth, structured data, canonical URL, social share tags, and images & alt text — from your live HTML, and combines them by geometric mean with your raw search footprint into one 0–100 Discoverability Score. It is deterministic: the same URL returns the same score, because no language model is anywhere near the number. Eight signals is the honest count, and page speed, robots.txt, indexability and llms.txt are not among them.

The free checker at reachkit.app/tools/on-page-check needs no account and no email, and allows 30 checks per hour from one address — enough to change a title, re-run it, and see the result while the file is still open.

The paid plan is where the two stop being the same kind of thing. Instead of a report, you get a ranked weekly action plan — one task surfaced per day — where every item cites the evidence it came from: the tag that is missing, the query your rivals rank for and you do not, the page outranking you. The next weekly scan re-measures the site, and where the score moved, the gain is attributed to the on-page fix you shipped rather than assumed. What ReachKit does not have is continuous monitoring: it re-measures weekly, not on every deploy, and it will not page you when something breaks.

The first scan is free; the weekly engine is €29.50/month — the 50% launch price, locked for life, normally €59.

Who should pick which

Pick DebugBear if you suspect the problem is technical: the site is slow, Core Web Vitals are failing, something is blocking the crawler, or you want alerts the next time a deploy regresses any of that. Pick it too if AI-agent readiness is on your list — llms.txt, the accessibility tree and WebMCP are checked there and nowhere in ReachKit.

Pick ReachKit if the page is already technically fine and the question is which change is worth making this week — if you want the findings ordered by what they are worth to the searches you are trying to win, and the score re-measured next week to see whether the fix moved it.