Reading your site before you sign up

You can point Rankbench at a website before you have an account. It reads the site, works out what search engines make of it, finds the sites competing for the same searches, and drafts a month of article ideas. It takes about a minute and costs nothing.

The page is at /read, headed READ MY SITE over the line "Type your site. We'll read it."

Starting one

There is one field, Your website, and one button, Read my site. A bare domain is fine. Underneath, the page states its own terms: "Reading is free and takes about a minute. Nothing is stored unless you keep it."

That last sentence is exact. The read exists for as long as you are watching it and expires afterwards unless you claim it.

What you watch

The read is deliberately not a progress bar. It puts each thing it learns on screen as it learns it, in seven acts, and the numbers count up as they arrive.

It starts with who you are: the site's name, what it appears to be about, where it operates. Then what Google sees, which is where the visit estimates, the rankings and the pages carrying the site appear. Then the sites competing for the same searches, described honestly as "Similar by search overlap, not by our opinion." Then the structural problems it found while reading your pages, ranked by what each is costing. Then a plan: thirty days of article topics drawn from the searches you already rank for.

Every figure carries a line saying what kind of measurement it is and when it was taken. The page says so once, near the top: "Everything below is measured, with its source."

What it cannot know yet

A read is an outside view. It has never been inside your Google account, so anywhere your own click and impression data would belong, it says so instead of guessing: "Connect Search Console after signup and this fills in."

A few planned articles are held back too, marked as written after signup. The plan you can see is real; the titles behind the first few are the part that needs an account.

Some sites cannot be read at all. A site that blocks automated visitors, or one that is not public, comes back with a plain refusal rather than an invented result. So does a read that runs out of time.

Keeping it

At the end there is one control, Keep this read, which takes you to signup. Create the account and the whole read is claimed into your new workspace: the audit findings, the site map, the competitor list and the thirty days of planned articles all arrive with it, so your first screen is not empty.

One catch worth knowing. The read is tied to the browser that started it. If you open the link somewhere else you are told to go back to the browser you began in, or start a fresh read. That is what stops somebody else claiming a read of your site.

A read that has expired says so and offers to start again.

The offer at the end

When the read finishes you may be shown an upgrade offer built from your own plan, headed with the line that your plan is ready for the next step. It has two buttons: one continues to payment for Pro, the other is Keep my plan free.

The free option is not a trap. The calendar, the keywords and the planning stay free; Pro is what writes the articles for you. The read says as much: "Reading is free. $99 a site when you want the writing." Rankbench Pro and billing has the detail.

What the read is not

It is not the site audit. The audit that runs inside your workspace goes deeper, follows more pages, re-checks itself and keeps a history you can compare against. The read is the version that has to work in a minute, for a stranger, without permission to do anything.

Once you have an account, running the site audit is the one to use.

Where to go next

If you have already made an account, adding your first website picks up the story. If your read produced a plan you liked, the content calendar is where it lives afterwards.