Check Engine vs Sitechecker
Sitechecker is a cloud SEO platform from $99–$449/mo. It overlaps with Check Engine on crawling and very little else, and the honest headline is that it answers questions Check Engine refuses to answer at all.
What Sitechecker does that Check Engine does not
- Rank tracking. Its rank tracker keeps SERP history for the keywords you track. Check Engine does not track rankings, and says so on its own home page: that needs a crawled index of the whole web, which is bought rather than built.
- AI brand visibility. Its AI visibility tracker covers five models (ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode, Perplexity and Copilot) and reports brand visibility, mentions and citations. This is the one worth reading twice, because it looks like something Check Engine does and is not.
- Search Console and Analytics dashboards, and website monitoring that tracks changes over time from the cloud. Check Engine re-audits saved sites on a schedule while the app is open. It does not track rankings.
The AI distinction, stated against our own interest
Check Engine checks AI access: robots.txt rules for 22 named AI crawlers. A separate check requests your homepage as 9 AI crawlers plus Googlebot from your own computer. A firewall can treat the real, verified crawler differently, so your server's own logs settle whether it was allowed through.
Sitechecker is answering a different question: whether an assistant currently mentions you. That is a measurement of an outcome, and Check Engine does not make it. Every AI figure this site publishes is about access rather than about being quoted, and we have been careful to say so everywhere else, so it would be dishonest to imply the two overlap here. If what you want to know is whether ChatGPT names your brand today, Check Engine cannot tell you and Sitechecker is built to.
The two are complements more than alternatives. Access is a precondition: a crawler that cannot read your pages will not cite them. Check Engine checks the rules and homepage access from your computer; your server's logs show what happened to the real crawler. Whether citation then happens is a question about the model, and needs a tool that watches the model. Profound does only that half, at enterprise pricing, if tracking mentions is the whole of what you need. What Check Engine checks on the access side is written out crawler by crawler.
What Check Engine adds
99 checks across thirteen areas, including conversion and brand consistency, which do not appear in Sitechecker's listed core tools. Findings arrive as a ranked plan with the fix written out rather than as a dashboard. The ordering formula is published. It runs on your computer with no account, and the crawl and the report stay there. And it is $59 once rather than a monthly bill.
That last one is the plainest difference. A year on Sitechecker's entry plan costs several times what Check Engine costs in total, and the second year costs the same again. Set against that: Sitechecker monitors from its cloud and tracks rankings. Check Engine re-audits saved sites on a schedule while the app is open, but does not track rankings.
Which to buy
- Buy Sitechecker if you need rank tracking, ongoing monitoring, or to know whether AI assistants are mentioning your brand.
- Buy Check Engine if you want a deep one-off audit of what is wrong and in what order, including conversion and brand, without an account or a recurring bill.
One contrast worth carrying away: Sitechecker does not count how often you crawl, and much of this market does. Its plans advertise unlimited recrawls, and cap the pages tracked across an account at 10,000, 50,000 and 200,000 on the first three plans. SEOptimer sells four, ten or fifty crawls a month depending on the tier, which changes how you work far more than any feature list does. Nothing here compares the quality of the two crawlers' output, because that has not been measured. Both vendors' published feature lists are what this page is built from.
Checked 19 October 2026. The factual claims about this product were read from its own pages on that date: its plans are priced 99, 249 and 449 US dollars a month, discounted to 83, 208 and 375 a month when paid annually (source); every plan is listed as including unlimited users, unlimited recrawls, AI search visibility tracking, GSC and GA4 insights, and a rank tracker with SERP history (source); its AI visibility tracker covers five models (ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode, Perplexity and Copilot) for brand visibility and for mentions and citations (source); its core tools are listed as website crawler, website monitoring, rank tracker, GSC dashboard, SEO dashboard and AI visibility tracker (source); its plan table lists the total pages crawled across an account: 10,000 on Basic, 50,000 on Standard, 200,000 on Premium and unlimited on Enterprise, beside unlimited site recrawls on every plan; the other published limits are on websites, tracked keywords and AI prompts (source). Products change and pricing changes; if something here has gone out of date, tell us and it will be corrected. Everything else on this page is a comparison of approach, not a claim about their roadmap.
Check Engine is a one-time purchase for Mac and Windows: no account, no crawl credits, and the crawl runs
on your machine. Five optional checks fetch data it cannot produce alone; --offline
turns all five off.
$59once
For Macs with Apple silicon or Intel, macOS 12 or later, and 64-bit Windows
Priced in US dollars. Checkout shows your currency and any local tax.
On a Mac? Get the Mac version.
On your phone?
Launch price: $29.50 once, through 30 November. From 1 December: $59. Buy applies the code FOUNDINGDOCKET for you; if the checkout shows $59, enter it under ‘Have a discount code?’.
Screaming Frog is $279 a year. Ahrefs plans with Site Audit run $129–$449 a month. Check Engine is $59 once. Screaming Frog’s price read 4 November 2026, Ahrefs’ 9 November 2026.
30 days, no conditions, no questions asked. Refund policy
Intel Mac? Get the Intel version
Common questions
Is Check Engine a Sitechecker alternative?
Only partly, and the gap matters. Sitechecker tracks keyword rankings and whether five AI models mention your brand. Check Engine does neither. Check Engine audits what is wrong with your site and ranks the fixes, and checks whether AI crawlers are allowed to reach you in the first place.
Does Check Engine track AI visibility like Sitechecker?
No, and the difference is worth being precise about. Sitechecker measures whether assistants mention you, which is an outcome. Check Engine checks robots.txt rules for 22 AI crawlers. A separate check requests your homepage as 9 AI crawlers plus Googlebot. Access is a precondition for citation, not the same thing as it.
Which is cheaper?
Check Engine costs less even for a month at the listed prices: $59 once; Sitechecker starts at $99–$449/mo and keeps billing. Choose Sitechecker for its cloud platform tools, including monitoring and rank history. Check Engine re-audits saved sites on a schedule while the app is open, but does not track rankings.
Does Sitechecker limit how much you can crawl?
Not how often. Its plans advertise unlimited recrawls, unlike SEOptimer, which sells four, ten or fifty crawls a month. They do cap the total pages crawled across an account: 10,000 on Basic, 50,000 on Standard and 200,000 on Premium, unlimited on Enterprise. The other limits it publishes are on websites, tracked keywords and AI prompts. Check Engine has no limits of any of those kinds, because there is no account.