Free tool
What does a stranger think you do?
Five seconds is roughly what a first time visitor gives your homepage before deciding whether to stay. This runs that test: paste your URL and find out what someone with no context takes away from it. No email, no signup.
No email needed. Capped daily and limited to one test per visitor per day, because the model behind it is not free to run.
Why five seconds
You know what your business does, so you cannot read your own homepage. Every visitor arrives without any of the context in your head, gives the page a few seconds, and leaves if they cannot place you. Nothing further down the page gets read at all.
The failure is almost never design. It is that the page opens with what the business believes about itself rather than what it sells, to whom. A visitor cannot act on a belief. They can act on a sentence that names the thing, the buyer and the next step.
So this test asks the only three questions that decide whether anyone stays, and tells you which of them your page currently answers.
Questions
- What is a five second test?
- It is the oldest usability test there is. You show someone a page for five seconds, take it away, and ask what the business does, who it is for, and what they were meant to do next. Whatever they cannot answer is what your page failed to communicate. This runs the same test with an AI model reading the page cold, so you can do it in a minute instead of recruiting people.
- How is this different from your site audit?
- The audit looks at the whole page and scores it across nine areas: structure, credibility, calls to action, accessibility signals and so on. This asks one question instead: can a stranger tell what you do. Most sites that fail this are not failing on craft, they are failing because the business never wrote down plainly what it sells and to whom.
- Does it work for businesses that are not software?
- Yes, and that is the point. It judges the page against its own goals, so a dental practice, a logistics firm, a law firm and a builder all get read on their own terms. It is told explicitly never to assume the page is selling software.
- Do I need to give you my email?
- No. The result appears on screen, and it gets its own link you can send to whoever writes your copy. There is nothing to sign up for.
- Why is it limited?
- It runs on an AI model with a fixed free allowance shared across every tool on this site. Rather than take payment for something we built as a demonstration, we cap it and keep it free. If the cap is hit, the runway calculator has no limit at all.
If a stranger cannot tell what you do, neither can a buyer.
Working out what a business actually sells, and saying it in one sentence, is where every engagement we take on starts.