Looking for a Cruelx alternative?
Cruelx is the nearest thing on this page to our own shape: buy one report, pay once, walk away with a long document. They also do two things we do not. They read your mail and certificate records and print them as found, and they sell a separate scan of whether AI assistants name your business. Where we part company is what the judgement rests on. The half of their report they call their edge scores your page against named persuasion principles, and nothing is published about what those scores were fitted to. Ours are fitted to what thousands of real readers reported about real pages, and Search Console tells us afterwards whether the work paid.
Cruelx and you x you i, side by side
| Feature | you x you i ResearchPublished research and standards, your real page, and your real search data | Cruelx ChecklistsNamed checks they publish as read, plus persuasion rules with no source |
|---|---|---|
| Conversions More of your visitors buy | ||
| Tells you why people are not buying | Measured | Opinion |
| Checks your headline says what you sell | Measured | Opinion |
| Findability More visitors arrive and more of them buy | ||
| Tracks whether AI assistants mention your brand | Not checked | MeasuredSeparate purchase |
| Links your fixes to your Google traffic | Measured | Not checked |
| Technical health More visitors arrive, more of them buy and more people can use your site | ||
| Checks people with disabilities can use it | Measured | MeasuredContrast only |
| Checks your domain and email are set up right | Not checked | Measured |
| Trust and brand More visitors trust what they see | ||
| Checks your site looks trustworthy | Checks | Opinion |
| Checks your brand is consistent | Measured | Opinion |
| Clarity More of your visitors buy | ||
| Checks your writing reads clearly | Measured | Opinion |
| How it works How each tool is run and priced, and what its scores rest on | ||
| Emails you what your fixes did, 30 days on | ||
| Scores measured against what real people said, not an opinion | ||
| Puts your own logo on the report | ||
| One audit, no subscription | ||
| Pricing | $5 per audit, no subscription required | From $8.99 one-off |
The scoring behind your audit is state of the art: more than a dozen machine-learning models, several built on research published in the last two years, benchmarked on held-out data and calibrated to how thousands of real people rated thousands of real web pages. No other audit at this price grades a site this way.
Grounded in research and web standards
- WCAG 2.2 accessibility standard
- Google Core Web Vitals performance standard
- Usability research usability principles
- Web-credibility research trust
- Eye-tracking research visual attention
- Readability research clarity
- Colour science brand consistency
When to choose Cruelx
Buy from Cruelx when the domain plumbing is the thing keeping you up: mail records, certificate expiry, response headers and whether anyone can send email pretending to be you. They print those as found rather than as a verdict, which is the right way round, and we do not check any of it today. Their free daily report is also a genuinely useful way to see a finished document before spending anything, and if you want the assistant-citation scan as well you can buy both from one place.
When to choose you x you i
Choose us when the number has to carry weight outside the tool that produced it. Our scores are fitted against what thousands of real readers reported about real pages, so a low mark points at a named problem rather than a mood. Connect Search Console and we email you at 30, 60 and 90 days with what actually moved. The audit costs $5, paid once, with no subscription required.
What we check that Cruelx does not
Every one of these is a row in the table above, ticked in our column and blank in theirs.
- Checks AI can read and quote your pages
- Connects to Google Search Console
- Shows which searches moved after your audit
- Links your fixes to your Google traffic
- Shows what AI answers cost you in clicks
- Compares your clicks with last year
- Tracks your score against your Google traffic
- Predicts where visitors look first
- Flags copy that sounds AI-written
- Emails you what your fixes did, 30 days on
- Scores measured against what real people said, not an opinion
What a year costs
Same year, both tools, list prices only.
- Cruelx Starter, 5 full reports a month, $25 a month
- $300a year
- you x you i $5 an audit, 12 audits, one a month
- $60a year
- Difference over a year
- $240
And you only pay for the audits you run. One audit is $5, paid once, so a year of monthly checks is a ceiling and not a bill. A subscription is the other way round: you pay it whether you look at it that month or not.
The two tools do different jobs, and the table above says which. This is only what each one asks for.
Cruelx list price read from cruelx.com on 21 August 2026. Prices change; this one is checked by hand.
Cruelx vs you x you i: common questions
What does Cruelx do that you do not?
Three things, and we would rather say so plainly. They read your domain and email setup and publish what they find. They sell a scan of whether AI assistants mention your business. And they will put your own logo on the report, which we cannot do at all.
Is their buyer-psychology section the same as yours?
It covers similar ground and rests on different footing. Theirs names a set of persuasion principles and scores six sub-dimensions against them, with nothing published about how those scores were arrived at. Ours are fitted to ratings collected from real readers, which is what lets the same page score the same way twice.
Their report is much longer. Does that matter?
Length is not the same as usefulness, and a long document is easy to produce once a model is writing it. What we would ask of any report, ours included, is what each number answers to and whether anything checks the advice afterwards. Those are the two questions this page is built around.
Do you tell me whether the fixes worked?
Yes, and this is the difference we would put first. Connect Search Console once and every later audit is compared against a picture of what your traffic would have done without the changes, so the answer is an estimate with a stated range rather than a guess from a line chart.
What is the audit based on?
Our own machine-learning models, each tuned on hundreds of real business pages and checked against the web standards professionals use for speed, accessibility, readability, and brand. Where a single-purpose tool checks one slice of your site, every score here comes from published research and is ranked by what actually moves visitors.