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A complete reference for every tab and setting in Winking Toad -- what it does, whether it needs a crawl first, and what it costs. New here? The full User Manual walks through your first audit and how to apply fixes safely, step by step.

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Getting started

Create a free account, enter the URL you want to audit, and click Start. The free tier covers up to 500 URLs per crawl -- enough to fully audit most small business sites, with no export or usage credits included.

Most tabs fall into one of two kinds, and it matters which:

needs a crawl -- reads data from a crawl you've already run (Issues, Fix Priorities, Internal/External/Links, PageSpeed, AI Citation Readiness, and more). Run a crawl first, or these stay empty.
standalone -- AI Visibility, Keyword Research, Domain Overview, and Backlinks all take their own input (a brand name, a domain, keywords you type in) and work with no crawl ever run. Running a crawl does not populate these, and using these does not require a crawl.

Applying fixes directly

Connect a Shopify, WordPress, Webflow, BigCommerce, or Magento site under Settings to push supported fixes straight to your live site -- no manual copy-paste. Every connection writes live immediately once you click Apply; none of them have a draft/preview step, so back up the content you're changing first.

Issues & Fixes

The main tabs for working through what a crawl found.

Issues Free Needs a crawl

Also shown in the sidebar as "Site health check." The full list of every SEO problem the crawl found (errors, warnings, info), with a computed SEO Score, severity filters, and ready-made presets like "indexable pages missing descriptions." This is also where one-click fixes live: Copy-Paste Fixes work on any platform with no connection needed; llms.txt generation and IndexNow submission are here too; and if a CMS is connected in Settings, the CMS-specific Review/Apply Fix and Fix History tools appear here as well.

Caveat: CMS apply-fix buttons only work once that platform is connected in Settings. AI Rewrite Duplicates costs usage credits per draft and needs a paid plan.

Fix Priorities Free Needs a crawl

Also shown in the sidebar as "What to fix first." Groups the Issues tab's raw findings by shared root cause and impact -- a broken link repeated on 60 pages ranks above a one-off missing tag -- into a short, ranked action list, so effort goes to high-impact fixes first.

Caveat: derives entirely from Issues data; no separate cost or crawl of its own.

AI & GEO

Checks focused on how AI assistants and generative-search engines see your site.

AI Visibility Paid Standalone

Also shown in the sidebar as "Visibility in AI answers." Asks a real AI assistant buyer-style questions ("what are the best [category] tools?") and checks whether your brand gets mentioned or cited -- plus, at no extra cost, how often each named competitor shows up instead. You type in Brand, Domain, Category, optional Location, and up to 10 competitors yourself.

Caveat: costs usage credits per run. Defaults can be pre-filled once in Settings → AI Visibility so you don't retype them every time.

AI Citation Readiness Free Needs a crawl

Also shown in the sidebar as "Readiness for AI answers." Scores each crawled page on structural signals correlated with being cited in AI Overviews and answer engines: structured data, question-style headings, concise summaries, extractable lists/tables, and freshness dates. It's a coverage checklist, not a measured citation probability.

GEO Report Free to generate Needs a crawl

Also shown in the sidebar as "AI search readiness report." Packages your SEO summary, AI Citation Readiness, AI Visibility (if run), Keyword Opportunities, and Compliance Scanner results into one branded, printable report -- useful for sending to a client. Opens in its own tab for Print → Save as PDF.

Caveat: assembling the report is free; the underlying AI Visibility run it pulls from (if you ran one) already cost credits separately.

Compliance Scanner Free Needs a crawl

Also shown in the sidebar as "Website trust and compliance." Flags regulatory/trust risk areas from the crawl: EU AI Act content-disclosure requirements, FTC fake-review and AI-disclosure rules, and baseline cookie-consent/legal-page presence. A checklist for human review -- not legal advice.

Growth Tools

Research and opportunity-finding tools -- some read your crawl, some are independent lookups.

Internal Linker Free Needs a crawl

Finds pages with weak or no internal links pointing to them and suggests which stronger, topically-related pages should link to them, to spread link equity to orphaned or under-linked pages.

Keyword Opportunities Free Needs a crawl

Mines your own already-crawled content -- title, H1, H2 patterns -- for topic concentration and per-page keyword gaps. No external keyword data, no cost.

Keyword Research Paid Standalone

Real Google search volume, competition, and CPC data via DataForSEO. Enter one keyword per line, up to 1,000 per lookup, with a location selector.

Caveat: costs credits per lookup -- batched pricing, so looking up 1,000 keywords at once costs the same as looking up one.

Domain Overview Paid Standalone

Estimated organic/paid traffic and ranking-position distribution for any domain -- yours or a competitor's -- via DataForSEO. A whole-domain snapshot updated weekly by DataForSEO, not a live crawl.

Caveat: costs credits per lookup.

Backlinks Paid Standalone

Who links to a given domain, subdomain, or page -- anchor text, link strength, dofollow/nofollow -- via DataForSEO's own continuously-crawled index. Answers something a crawl of your own site could never answer on its own.

Caveat: costs credits per lookup, up to 100 backlinks per lookup.

Log Analyzer Paid

Upload a server access log (nginx/Apache combined format) to see which search engines and AI crawlers -- Googlebot, GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and others -- actually visited which pages, whether they saw real content, and whether robots.txt is accidentally blocking them.

Caveat: works best with a crawl already run to cross-reference against, but the upload itself doesn't strictly require one.

Crawl Data & Performance

The raw tables and page-speed data behind a crawl.

Overview Free Needs a crawl

Summary tables: status code distribution, and a master per-URL table covering status, indexability, title, meta description, H1, canonical, word count, response time, analytics tags, OG tags, JSON-LD, link/image counts, and JS usage.

Internal Free Needs a crawl

A flat table of every internally-crawled URL: address, status, content type, size, title.

External Free Needs a crawl

Same table shape as Internal, but for external-domain URLs discovered during the crawl.

Caveat: external links are only crawled/checked if "Crawl External Links" is turned on in Settings → Crawler.

Links Free Needs a crawl

Two filterable, searchable tables: Internal Links and External Links, each showing source, target, status, anchor text, and placement, with a status-code filter (2xx/3xx/4xx/5xx).

PageSpeed Free Needs a crawl

Google PageSpeed Insights results -- Core Web Vitals and performance scores -- for the homepage and two category pages.

Caveat: also needs "Enable PageSpeed Analysis" turned on in Settings → Requests before the crawl runs. A Google API key is optional but recommended -- it raises the rate limit substantially.

Search Performance Free Needs a crawl

Cross-references crawl-detected issues against real Google Search Console clicks and impressions, so a problem on a high-traffic page can be told apart from the same problem on a page nobody searches for.

Caveat: also needs a Google Search Console connection made in Settings → Search Console -- otherwise shows a placeholder asking you to connect it.

Settings: Crawl Configuration

Controls how a crawl behaves -- scope, requests, filters, and output.

Crawler

Core crawl scope: Maximum Crawl Depth (default 3), Maximum URLs to Crawl, Crawl Delay in seconds, Follow Redirects, and Crawl External Links.

Caveat: free-tier crawls are hard-capped at 500 URLs regardless of this setting's value; paid crawls past that cap are billed per URL at a small overage rate.

Requests

HTTP behavior: User Agent string, a "look like a real browser" toggle for sites with basic bot-blocking, Request Timeout, Retry Attempts, Accept-Language, Respect robots.txt, Allow Cookies, Discover Sitemaps, and the Enable PageSpeed Analysis toggle plus API key field.

Caveat: the "look like a real browser" toggle should only be used on sites you're authorized to crawl. The PageSpeed toggle here is a prerequisite for the PageSpeed tab to show any data.

Filters

Content scope: Include/Exclude File Extensions, Include/Exclude URL Patterns (regex-capable), Maximum File Size, plus duplicate-content detection with an adjustable similarity threshold.

Export Paid

Default export format (CSV/Excel/JSON/XML) and which of roughly two dozen fields to include -- URL, status code, title, meta description, canonical, OG tags, JSON-LD, link/image counts, issues detected, and more.

Caveat: exporting data is a paid-tier feature. Free accounts can view every result on-screen, but taking the data out of the app requires a subscription.

JavaScript

Turns on real browser rendering (Playwright/Chromium) so the crawler sees content that JavaScript builds after the page loads -- common on modern Shopify themes and single-page apps. Off by default.

Caveat: significantly slower and heavier than plain HTTP crawling. Turn it on only for sites you know are JavaScript-heavy.

Issue Exclusion

A list of URL patterns (one per line) to skip when detecting issues -- so admin pages, plugin files, and system paths that were never meant to be indexed don't clutter the report with false problems. Ships with sensible WordPress defaults since WordPress is the one supported platform where admin URLs sit on the same domain as public content.

Caveat: a generic feature, not tied to any one platform -- add your own patterns for any site's internal-only paths.

Custom CSS

Free-text CSS to restyle the Winking Toad interface itself -- colors, fonts, spacing. Applies immediately on save, and only affects how the app looks to you, not the site you're auditing.

Advanced Admin only

Concurrent Requests, Memory Limit, Log Level, Save Session Data, Proxy settings, and Custom Headers.

Caveat: reserved for the Winking Toad operator/staff account, not part of any customer plan.

Settings: Platform Connections

Connect a live store or site so Winking Toad can apply fixes directly. Every connection writes live immediately -- back up your content before applying a fix.

Shopify

Connects a Shopify store for direct-apply fixes to product SEO titles, descriptions, and image alt text. Enter your Shop Domain plus either a Client ID/Secret pair (auto-refreshing) or an Admin API Access Token, then Test Connection. Includes an Alt Text Template with placeholders for product title, vendor, and product type.

Caveat: no draft/preview step -- applying a fix writes to the real store immediately. Export a product backup first.

WordPress

Enter your Site URL, Username, and an Application Password (generated in wp-admin → Users → Profile) to connect. Covers post/page titles, meta descriptions (needs Yoast SEO or RankMath active), image alt text, and broken internal links.

Caveat: no preview step; back up your site first. Credentials go directly from your browser to your own site.

Webflow

Enter your Site ID and an API Token with Pages read/write access to connect.

Caveat: covers static Page SEO title/description only -- CMS Collection items aren't covered yet.

BigCommerce

Enter your Store Hash and an API Account Access Token to connect.

Caveat: covers product title/meta description only.

Magento

Enter your Store URL and an Integration Access Token to connect.

Caveat: covers product meta title/meta description only.

Settings: Account & Power-User Tools

Defaults, integrations, and billing that apply across the whole account.

AI Visibility defaults

Saves your Brand name, Domain, Category, Location, and competitor list so you don't retype them every time you run an AI Visibility check on the workspace tab. Saving defaults here is free -- running the actual check still costs credits.

MCP Access Paid

Lets an external MCP-compatible client -- Claude Code, Cursor, or similar -- query your crawl reports directly: list crawls, pull issue summaries, look up a URL's SEO data, or diff two crawls, without you copy-pasting results into a chat. Generate a labeled key here and add it to your client's MCP config.

Caveat: requires an active paid subscription, checked on every request -- a cancelled subscription's key stops working immediately, not just at renewal.

Search Console

Connects your real Google Search Console data (clicks, impressions, position) via OAuth, so issues found in a crawl can be cross-referenced against pages that actually get search traffic. Pick the property that matches the site you crawl; disconnect any time.

Billing

Shows your current subscription status. Winking Toad is ₹1,499/month, one plan, everything included: CMS direct-apply fixes are unmetered with an active subscription, while AI Visibility, Keyword Research, Domain Overview, Backlinks, and AI content drafts draw from a monthly included credit allowance that resets each billing cycle.

Credits & pricing, at a glance

Free tier covers crawling and viewing every result on-screen, with no card required. A paid subscription (₹1,499/month) adds exporting your data, direct-apply fixes to connected platforms, MCP access, and a monthly included allowance of credits for the AI/research features below. If a metered feature runs out of included credits, it tells you when they reset -- there's no separate credit top-up purchase today.

Feature	Free tier?	Costs credits?	Needs a crawl?
Issues, Fix Priorities, crawl data tabs, AI Citation Readiness, Compliance Scanner, Keyword Opportunities, Internal Linker, GEO Report, PageSpeed	Yes	No	Yes
Search Performance	Yes	No	Yes + Search Console connected
AI Visibility	No	Yes, per run	No -- standalone
Keyword Research	No	Yes, per batch (up to 1,000 keywords)	No -- standalone
Domain Overview	No	Yes, per lookup	No -- standalone
Backlinks	No	Yes, per lookup (up to 100 backlinks)	No -- standalone
Log Analyzer	No	No -- flat paid-tier gate	Optional
Scheduled crawls	No	No	—
AI description & alt-text drafts (Shopify)	No	Yes, per draft	Yes
CMS direct-apply fixes (Shopify/WordPress/Webflow/BigCommerce/Magento)	No -- included free with a paid plan	No	Yes + platform connected
Exporting data (any format)	No	No -- flat paid-tier gate	Yes

Scheduled crawls

Under Workspace → Schedules, set a site to re-crawl itself automatically, weekly or monthly. After each run, you get an email showing what's new and what got fixed since the last check -- so you find out about a new broken link the week it appears, not months later.

Need more help?

Reach out from the contact form on the homepage -- we read every message.