Free tools, no account needed

Summary#

Eleven Metric Vault tools are published at /free-tools and run without an account. They are the real product code, not a demo: the same handlers that serve the technical checks inside the dashboard serve these pages. What you give up by staying anonymous is history, not accuracy. This page explains exactly where the line sits so you never expect a capability that is not there.

Purpose#

Most SEO tools ask for an email before they show you anything. That is a bad trade for the person who has one question and needs the answer now: is my robots.txt blocking Googlebot, is my sitemap valid, can ChatGPT read this page.

The free tools exist so that question can be answered in one page load. They also serve a second purpose that we are open about. They are how most people meet Metric Vault, and each one ends by pointing at the in-app tool that turns a one-page check into ongoing measurement.

Overview#

The eleven tools#

What "free" actually means here#

No account, no card, no per-run cap, and no credit charge. The free tools are priced at zero credits in the platform's cost table, which is why they can be served anonymously at all. Tools that call a paid data provider cannot be, so they are not on this list.

There is one shared protection: an hourly fair-use limit applied per IP address. Ordinary use never reaches it. Scripted use does, and the response says so:

What you do not get without an account#

This is the honest list. None of the following exist on the public pages:

• No saved history. Anonymous runs are not written to your Saved Work, because there is no account to write them to. Close the tab and the result is gone. Signed-in runs are recorded, which is what Saved Work reads.
• No exports. No PDF, Excel, CSV, JSON or shareable link. The in-app result shell carries those; see Exporting results.
• No Get Recommendations. The AI action-plan panel that turns a result into ranked next steps is a paid feature. See Get Recommendations.
• No scheduling or alerts. Nothing re-runs on its own. Recurring checks live in Scheduled reports and Rank alerts.
• No country, device or date-range targeting. The global filters in the app do not apply, because these tools read one live page rather than query a ranking database.
• No site-wide crawl. Every free tool reads the single URL you type. Crawling a whole property is Site Audit.
• No comparison over time. You get today's snapshot with nothing to compare it against.

Where the numbers come from#

Every free tool reports what it measured, and only that. There is no language model writing narrative on these pages and nothing is estimated. The checkers fetch your HTML, count what is in it, and score against fixed published thresholds. The PageSpeed tool passes your URL to Google's official PageSpeed Insights API and renders Google's own Lighthouse result.

That constraint is why the AI-readiness tools score readiness rather than outcomes. Reading a page tells you whether an engine could cite it. It cannot tell you whether an engine did. Measuring what ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude actually say about you over time needs live model queries on a schedule, which is what the AI Visibility tools in the app do.

How it works#

1. You submit a domain or URL. The page normalises it, adding https:// if you typed a bare domain, and rejects anything that is not a plausible hostname with That does not look like a valid domain. Try example.com.
2. The request goes to the shared tool endpoint with no identity attached. The endpoint checks that the tool type is one it recognizes before doing any work, refuses private, loopback and internal addresses, and applies the hourly per-IP limit.
3. The tool fetches the live target. Nothing is read from a cache except in the PageSpeed tool, where Google's result is reused for six hours per URL and device so repeated runs do not burn Google's daily quota. Caching in the app is a broader topic covered in Result caching and freshness.
4. The page renders the result client-side. The score, the checks and the fixes are all computed from what came back.

Language and appearance#

All twelve public pages, including the index, carry the site language switcher and are translated into the six languages Metric Vault ships. They also follow the light or dark theme you last chose on the site.

When to use a free tool, and when not to#

Use one when you have a single page and a single question, when you are checking someone else's site, or when you want to confirm a deploy did not break robots.txt. They are fast and there is nothing to set up.

Do not use one when you need the answer again next week, when the question is about a whole site rather than a page, or when the question is about rankings, traffic, keywords or backlinks. None of those can be answered by fetching one page, and the free tools will not pretend otherwise. Start with Create your account and Quick start: your first result in five minutes instead.