Audit Your Newsroom's — or Newsletter's — Digital Health.
Get a plain-language site audit across SEO, UX, trust signals, and AI readiness — scored against the platform you actually run, not against the New York Times — with clear next steps to fix what's holding your traffic back.
Free scan. Full report — $49.
Free
Instant scorecardEverything you need to see where you stand.
- Letter grade (A–F) + overall score out of 10
- AI-generated summary of your site's strengths and gaps
- All 11 category scores — Strong, Needs Work, or Critical
- Radar overview of your performance shape
- Preview of the top issue in each category
- Terms of Service rights-grab check (advisory, not scored)
- Shareable score link for X, LinkedIn, or email
Full remediation plan
$49Everything in Free, plus the complete fix-it guide.
- A score, or an honest “not verified,” for every category
- Top 5 prioritized recommendations — plain-language, with who should act & what to say
- Step-by-step fix instructions, code snippets & CMS-specific guidance
- Implementation roadmap — This Week, This Month, This Quarter
- Full per-criterion breakdown across all 70+ criteria
- Trust Project compliance checklist
- llms.txt generator for AI crawler disclosure
- robots.txt analyzer with AI-crawler recommendations
- Commercial licensing schema analysis
- Peer benchmarking against similar sites
- Score-change tracking across re-scans
Scan first — unlock the full plan for $49 when you're ready.
A small score shift between identical re-scans isn’t necessarily a real change — some pages load differently run-to-run.
Used across the industry
Independent & Newsletter Writers
Major Dailies
Public Radio & Campus Papers
How it works
Enter your URL
We analyze your homepage, article pages, about page, contact page, and technical files like robots.txt and your RSS feed.
We evaluate 70+ criteria
Covering design, trust signals, SEO, mobile experience, accessibility, and AI readiness — scored against journalism best practices.
Get your grade and action plan
Prioritized recommendations written for site owners, not developers — with plain-language explanations and who should act.
Also included, free: every report checks your Terms of Service for clauses that claim broad rights over content readers submit — separate from the 70+ scored criteria, and never part of your grade.
A note on security: if a site uses bot-protection software (DataDome, Cloudflare, and similar), we’ll tell you we couldn’t evaluate it — we won’t guess a low score from pages we couldn’t read.
Same for JavaScript: if a page loads its real content by JavaScript in a way we can’t extract, we’ll say so — not guess. You’ll see “not verified” for that criterion, not a confident wrong number.
Built for newsroom leaders — and independent publishers
NewsGrade is built for editors, publishers, digital directors, journalism funders, and independent newsletter writers — who want to improve their site but don't have a technical background. Every recommendation includes plain-language explanations, identifies who on your team should act, and gives them the exact words to use.
News Directors & Editors
Understand your site's strengths and gaps without needing a developer to explain them.
Publishers & GMs
Get a board-ready report showing where your digital product stands and what to invest in.
Journalism Funders
Evaluate a grantee's digital infrastructure before writing a check.
Press Associations
Offer site audits as a member benefit at scale.
Independent & Newsletter Writers
No dev team, no masthead — just a plain-language report on what's actually hurting your reach, scored against other newsletter platforms instead of legacy CMS sites.
For Site Owners
Own a news website? Take control of your score.
If your site uses security protections that block automated analysis — like Cloudflare, Akamai, or a corporate WAF — your NewsGrade score may be incomplete or unavailable. Verifying your site solves this permanently.
- ✓Step-by-step allowlist instructions for Cloudflare, Akamai, AWS WAF, Nginx, and Apache
- ✓The most accurate analysis possible — our tool can access all your public pages
- ✓A Verified Publisher badge on your results
- ✓A Publisher Dashboard to track your score over time
- ✓Priority access to re-evaluations
Verification takes 5 minutes and works like Google Search Console — add a small tag to your site to prove you own it, and you're set.