ShipworkSite inspection
Checks
Every error, explainedGuides →
Pricing Learn Guides

A free alternative to Sitebulb for a first pass

Sitebulb is a crawler with 300+ hints, a desktop app and a cloud tier, from $18 a month. Shipwork is a free web check that runs from outside your network and covers the AI-era signals a crawl hint list does not.

One crawl of a bounded sample of public pages, from outside your network. Nothing is stored.

What Sitebulb does well

Sitebulb crawls at scale, explains over three hundred hints in plain words, compares audits over time, and produces client-ready PDF reports. For a consultant who needs depth and a deliverable, it is strong.

Where a crawler stops

A crawl reads pages. It does not open a TLS connection, resolve DNS or email records, read Merchant Center disapprovals, or ask whether GPTBot is allowed in robots.txt. And when you run it from your own machine, you see your site from your own network, which is the one place a bot-protection failure never shows.

What Shipwork does instead

  • Free and account-free, so it is the first pass before you decide to pay for depth.
  • Outside-network reachability, plus TLS, DNS, email auth and AI crawler access.
  • Merchant Center product data and a feed-file check for the fields a crawl cannot see.
  • A printable report and a daily watch, so a snapshot becomes a record.

Which should you use?

Use Sitebulb when you need a deep, exportable, client-ready crawl. Run the free Shipwork audit first to find where the problem is and whether it is outside-network, then go deeper.

Questions

Is Shipwork a replacement for Sitebulb?
No. Sitebulb crawls deeper and produces client reports. Shipwork is a free first pass with checks a crawl does not make.
How many pages does it crawl?
A bounded sample by default; the deep crawl reads the whole sitemap. Neither is an exhaustive per-URL export.
Is it free?
The checks are free and need no account. The daily watch is the paid part.