SEO by Daniel vs SEO Site Checkup

SEO Site Checkup has been running for more than a decade and now leans its pitch toward LLM and AI-visibility intelligence. SEO by Daniel is a lean scored audit: drop in a domain, get a 0-100 score in about two seconds, hand the report to a client. Both answer "how healthy is this page?", but one caps the free answer at a single check per day and expects an account before the useful parts appear.

Where SEO Site Checkup wins

• A real free tier. One check per day at no cost, which is enough if you are checking the same site every morning.
• More than 12 years of history. The issue set is broad, and the platform has had time to sand down rough edges.
• AI-visibility framing. If a client asks about LLM mentions or how a brand shows up in AI search, the vocabulary is already there.
• Depth for readers. You can sit inside one report and work through the findings at your own pace.

Where SEO by Daniel wins

• No account and no daily cap. Run a scan in about two seconds, on as many domains as you like, without signing up.
• Sitemap auto-discovery. We read robots.txt, follow nested sitemap indexes and handle gzipped sitemaps, so a bare domain still covers the whole site.
• A client-ready artifact. Every report carries an executive summary, issues grouped by severity and CSV export. That is the thing you send, not a dashboard you reformat.
• Transparent entry price. €19/month, self-serve. SEO Site Checkup does not publish its paid entry, so you have to ask.
• Continuous monitoring instead of one capped check per day.

A real example

A Laravel freelancer gets a referral from a prospect who owns two small businesses: a workshop site and a separate booking site. The call is in twenty minutes. The freelancer opens SEO Site Checkup, runs the free check on the workshop domain, and gets a useful read. Then the prospect asks about the booking site. That is a second check on the same day, and the free tier is spent.

With SEO by Daniel, both domains get a 0-100 score before the call. The freelancer pastes the workshop site, reads the executive summary out loud, then does the same for the booking site. Both numbers are on screen in under five seconds total, with no login in between.

The part that closes the deal is the report. The freelancer exports the CSV and sends a two-page summary after the call: workshop at 61 with a slow homepage and missing alt text, booking site at 74 with three redirect chains. The prospect sees a scored document, not a screenshot of a tool. That is the difference between a capped checker and a report product.

The verdict

| | SEO Site Checkup | SEO by Daniel | |---|---|---| | Free tier | 1 check/day | Unlimited no-account scans | | Signup | Needed for real value | Not needed to scan | | AI-visibility framing | Yes | No | | Time to a shareable number | Bound by the daily cap | About two seconds | | Output | Platform view | Executive summary, severity grouping, CSV | | Entry price | Not published | €19/mo |

When to pick which

Pick SEO Site Checkup if you check one site on a regular schedule, you care about AI-visibility signals, and a free daily check plus an account is a fair trade. It has the longer track record and the broader issue list, and for a single in-house site that is a reasonable setup.

Pick SEO by Daniel if the job is comparison and delivery: several domains, a number you can say out loud on a call, and a report a client can read without a login. The €19 entry is published, the scan needs no account, and the output is built to leave your screen.

Run a free scan on your next prospect and see the score before the call.

FAQ

Is the free tier enough for client work? For one site, yes. It gets awkward the moment you need to compare two domains in the same afternoon, which is exactly when a freelancer tends to need it.

Does SEO by Daniel cover AI visibility? No. It scores on-page and technical SEO. If AI mentions are the question, keep a tool that is built for that question.

Do I need an account to try SEO by Daniel? No. Drop in a domain and get a 0-100 score. The full report, CSV export and monitoring sit behind the paid tier.