Audit

stardust:audit

One URL in. One scored, evidence-bound audit out.

audit looks at an existing website from three perspectives — design (brand tensions + concrete improvement opportunities), SEO/technical, and LLM/AI-search visibility — measures Core Web Vitals, and synthesizes everything into a seven-dimension scorecard plus a prioritized findings ledger that tells the owner what to improve to generate a better business outcome. The report is also the natural seed for a redesign: its findings feed the stardust uplift skill's improvements list and the stardust direct skill's Phase 2.5, and it closes with uplift-shaped redesign directions so "run $stardust uplift" is the obvious next step.

Opinionated defaults

• Multi-page by default — $stardust extract <url> --cap 8 (home + seven IA pillars) unless --single or --pages overrides.
• Non-interactive — the audit never asks questions. Every assumption it makes instead is recorded in audit.json#assumptions and stated in the report's executive summary.
• Evidence-bound — every claim cites a measurement, a T-* tension id, a check result, or a screenshot observation. A claim with no citation does not ship.
• No fabricated data — a measurement that could not be taken is reported as not measured (<reason>), never estimated silently. An estimate, where reasoned, is labeled as one with its basis.
• Graceful degradation, not failure — optional capabilities (refero, marketing-skills, modern-web-guidance, PageSpeed Insights) are probed once and their absence is recorded, never fatal. See § Degradation ladder.

Inputs

• <url> — required. The site to audit. A path narrows the crawl to that subtree (extract's semantics).
• --pages <n> — optional. Override the default 8-page extraction cap (passed through as --cap <n>).
• --single — optional. One-page audit of the given URL only. The cross-page checks (duplicate titles, sitemap coverage, CTA fragmentation across pages) then run on a single page and say so.
• --deploy — optional. After the report renders, publish report.html as a single self-contained page via the DA transport (../deploy/da-deploy-protocol.md: source PUT → preview → live) and print the delivered URL. Transport only — the report never goes through deploy's section→block conversion, which would decompose the self-contained file.
• --benchmark — optional. Force Phase 5 reference benchmarking: probe the refero MCP even when the earlier capability probe was slow or ambiguous. Without this flag Phase 5 fires only when the probe succeeds quickly.

There are no other flags. Everything else is derived from the captured surface or governed by the underlying skills' contracts.

Phase 0 — Setup

1. Run the master skill's setup (../stardust/SKILL.md § Setup) — with one audit-specific carve-out: impeccable absence is a degradation here, not the master setup's hard stop. When the dep check fails, record impeccable: unavailable in audit.json#degradations and continue — Phase 2 runs without the critique/audit arms (VISION pass + accessibility fold-in still fire) and Phase 6 skips the report render; the run ends at stop condition (b) after audit.json is written.
2. Extraction freshness check. If stardust/current/ holds an extraction of the same origin less than 7 days old — origin from stardust/state.json (the site record extract stamped), recency from the newest pages/<slug>.json#_provenance.fetchedAt — reuse it and record site.extraction.reused: true. Otherwise invoke $stardust extract <url> --cap 8 (or --single / --pages <n> per the inputs). Extract owns the crawl, the screenshots, _brand-extraction.json, pages/<slug>.json, PRODUCT.md / DESIGN.md, and brand-review.html with its Tensions section.
3. Probe optional capabilities once, recording each outcome in the degradation record (audit.json#degradations):
   • marketing-skills plugin (seo-audit, ai-seo skills present?)
   • modern-web-guidance (npx -y modern-web-guidance@latest search "<query>" responds?)
   • refero MCP (attempt mcp__refero__refero_search_styles; treat a tool-not-found or timeout as unavailable)
   • PageSpeed Insights API (network-reachable without a key?)
   • rollout project (stardust/rollout/rollout.json present?)

If extract fails entirely (site unreachable, bot-management block past the headed-Chrome fallback), stop and surface extract's error verbatim — there is nothing to audit. This is the only hard stop before synthesis; see § Stop conditions.

Procedure

Phase 1 — Brand surface & tension analysis

Read stardust/current/_brand-extraction.json and stardust/current/brand-review.html § Tensions surfaced (rule catalog in ../extract/reference/brand-review-template.md § Tensions). Every fired T-* tension is candidate evidence for a finding — carry the ids forward, do not re-derive the detections.

Compute the four brand-expression measurements the report needs. Each lands in audit.json#measurements with status + method per reference/report-format.md:

• brandColorShare — brand-color share of painted pixels on the captured home screenshot. Preferred method: Playwright pixel sampling (method: "pixel-sample") — load the screenshot, sample a grid (e.g. every 8th pixel), classify each sample to the nearest palette entry within a tolerance, and divide brand-hue samples by painted (non-white/near-white) samples. When sampling is infeasible in the session, a reasoned estimate from the captured surfaces is allowed but must ship as method: "surface-estimate" with its basis — never presented as measured.
• ctaFragmentation — distinct CTA labels per equivalence bucket, aggregated from pages/*.json#ctas[].label (the same buckets that drive T-cta-vocab).
• typeScale — distinct heading sizes and scale kind/ratio from _brand-extraction.json#type.scaleAudit.
• radiusSprawl — distinct border-radius values with occurrence counts from _brand-extraction.json#motifs.borderRadius.

Phase 2 — Design & experience critique

Three passes over the captured home page (screenshot + live URL), folded into one set of design findings:

1. impeccable critique + audit. Invoke impeccable through the harness's skill-invocation tool using the delegation mechanic in ../prototype/SKILL.md § Invoking impeccable (Claude Code form: Skill { skill: "impeccable:impeccable", args: "critique <target>" }, then "audit <target>" for the accessibility / responsive / performance passes). Normalize its findings into the audit's finding shape.
2. VISION pass. Study the captured screenshots directly (stardust/current/assets/screenshots/<slug>.png) and name what a design director would: dated patterns the field has moved past, hierarchy failures, missed opportunities the captured surface doesn't capitalize on. The claim discipline is absolute — every observation cites a measurement, a tension id, or a screenshot region ("home.png, hero: three equal-weight CTAs compete"). Adjectives without evidence do not become findings.
3. Accessibility fold-in. Contrast computed (WCAG ratios for the captured palette pairs in the roles they are actually used in), alt coverage from pages/*.json#media.images, landmark presence and heading order from pages/*.json#landmarks, content-free link labels (reuse T-link-content-free when fired).

Phase 3 — SEO & technical

When the marketing-skills plugin is installed, follow marketing-skills:seo-audit's methodology and normalize its issue/impact/evidence/fix items into findings. When absent, run the checks directly — they are all curl/Playwright-derivable:

Where a failure matches a rollout:baseline check id (../rollout/reference/checks.md: single-h1, title-missing, meta-description, canonical, sitemap, jsonld, img-alt, landmark-main, duplicate-title), reuse that id as the finding's evidence.ref (check:<id>) — findings recorded into a rollout ledger under a known id get picked up by the AEM autofix registry automatically.

Core Web Vitals. Measure LCP / CLS / TBT via Playwright performance APIs (PerformanceObserver for largest-contentful-paint and layout-shift, longtask entries for TBT) on two viewports: mobile (375×667, CPU throttled where the session supports it) and desktop (1440×900). When the PageSpeed Insights API is network-reachable without a key, prefer it and record method: "psi-api" (it adds field INP); otherwise record method: "playwright-lab" and say in the measurement note that lab TBT is a proxy for INP. Classify every metric against the Google thresholds tabled in reference/scoring.md § performance.

Remediation guidance. When modern-web-guidance is installed, run npx -y modern-web-guidance@latest search "<specific failure>" for each distinct failure class and cite the returned guide ids in the finding's guides[]. When absent, write the generic remediation and leave guides: [].

Phase 4 — LLM visibility

When marketing-skills:ai-seo is installed, follow its methodology. When absent, assess directly:

• llms.txt — present at the origin root?
• Answerability — does each audited page answer the question a user would ask of it ("what does this cost", "what is this") in extractable, well-structured prose — and how early on the page?
• schema.org coverage — do the JSON-LD entities cover the organization plus the page-type entities an answer engine needs for entity understanding?
• Heading-as-question coverage — what share of h2/h3 map to askable questions or scannable topics rather than slogans?
• Content depth — extractable prose word counts on key pages; specific, citable claims vs thin marketing copy.
• Key facts in crawlable text — are pricing, what-it-is, and who-it's-for stated in crawlable text, or locked in images and JS-rendered widgets?
• Citation readability, measured — run skills/deploy/scripts/ai-readability.mjs --origin <site> <sampled paths> and report the strict score per page with the top blocks adding rendered-only words; it is the exact formula of Adobe's AI Content Visibility Checker (deploy/reference/ai-readability.md).

Every Phase 4 finding names the concrete fix ("state the three price points in the pricing table as text; they currently render only inside the plan-card images"), not a category ("improve content").

Phase 5 — Reference benchmarking (optional)

Fires when the refero MCP tools are reachable — the Phase 0 probe attempted mcp__refero__refero_search_styles; --benchmark forces a re-probe. Skip gracefully when unavailable (benchmarks: { status: "skipped", reason: … }).

When available: retrieve 2–3 same-vertical reference styles, compare the audited site's brand expression (Phase 1 measurements) against what best-in-class in the category does, and cite each reference — title, URL, one line on what they do better — in the relevant design findings and in audit.json#benchmarks.references.

Phase 6 — Synthesis & report

1. Scorecard. Score the seven dimensions per reference/scoring.md — anchors first, evidence floor enforced, not-measured dimensions nulled and renormalized. Compute the weighted overall.

2. Findings. Consolidate Phases 1–5 into the prioritized ledger: P1 (actively losing business or excluding users) / P2 (material drag) / P3 (polish). Per finding: dimension, evidence (measurement / tension / screenshot / check / benchmark citation), businessImpact one-liner, concrete fix, guides[].

3. Uplift directions. Close with 2–3 redesign directions framed exactly like uplift's variant role contract (../uplift/SKILL.md § The three-variant role contract): A faithful + fixes (names the findings it resolves), B one captured-but-underused trait amplified, C cinematic (motion as identity, register suggested per ../prototype/reference/motion-registers.md § Selection heuristic). Drop B when the captured surface can't support a differentiated middle — two strong directions beat three weak ones.

4. Write stardust/audit/<domain-slug>/audit.json — schema, slug convention, and measurement rules in reference/report-format.md Part 1. Provenance _provenance first key.

5. Render stardust/audit/<domain-slug>/report.html by delegating to $impeccable craft with the brief in reference/report-format.md Part 2 — the same skill-invocation mechanic as prototype, and the same rule: never hand-template the report. Run the post-render validation checklist; on failure re-invoke craft with the specific violation. Open the result with open stardust/audit/<domain-slug>/report.html.

6. Ledger recording (rollout projects only). When stardust/rollout/rollout.json exists, record each finding into the delivery ledger via node skills/rollout/scripts/findings.mjs record with source namespace audit: — --source audit:<dimension>, --layer from the mapping below, severity carried through, --fixability normalized per ../rollout/reference/audit-sources.md § Recording an external finding. Write each returned id into the finding's ledgerId.

   audit dimension	ledger layer
   brand-expression	brand-tensions
   visual-hierarchy-craft	design-ux
   conversion-focus	content-conversion
   accessibility	accessibility
   technical-seo	seo (site-wide: cross-page)
   content-llm-visibility	ai-search
   performance	seo

7. --deploy. When passed, publish report.html via the DA transport per ../deploy/da-deploy-protocol.md — PUT the file as a single source, POST preview, POST live, verify the delivered URL returns 200 — and print the delivered URL. Transport only; never run deploy's section→block conversion on the report.

8. Chat summary. Short — the work is on disk and openable:

   audit complete — <url>
   
   Site health: <overall>/100
     <dimension>: <score>   × 7 (not-measured dimensions listed with reasons)
   
   Findings: <n> P1 · <n> P2 · <n> P3
   Top lever: <the single highest-impact P1, one line>
   
   Report: stardust/audit/<domain-slug>/report.html
   Data:   stardust/audit/<domain-slug>/audit.json
   
   Next: run `$stardust uplift <url>` — the report's closing directions
   are its variant briefs.
   

Degradation ladder

Probed once in Phase 0; every degradation is recorded in audit.json#degradations and rendered in the report's methodology appendix. None of these stops the audit.

Hard constraints

• No fabricated data. A measurement that could not be taken is not measured (<reason>) in both artifacts. Estimates are labeled with method + basis. This is the same discipline extract enforces against synthesis (../extract/SKILL.md § Failure modes) — fabricated audit numbers are worse than missing ones because they are actionable-looking and wrong.
• Evidence discipline. Every finding cites observable evidence: a measurement key, a T-* tension id, a screenshot region, a check id, or a benchmark URL. Uncited claims are cut in synthesis.
• Report is craft-rendered. report.html is authored by $impeccable craft against the brief in reference/report-format.md, validated afterward — never hand-templated, never hand-patched.
• Provenance is mandatory on both artifacts, per ../stardust/reference/artifact-map.md § Provenance shapes.
• Non-interactive. No questions in normal flow; assumptions are stated in the report. The only stops are the two below.
• Audit does not fix. Fixes belong to uplift (page redesign), direct Phase 2.5 (improvements list), and rollout's optimize loop (platform autofix). Audit names the fix; it never edits the site.

Stop conditions

Stop and surface only if:

(a) Extract fails entirely — site unreachable, structure unparseable, bot-management block past the headed-Chrome fallback. Surface extract's error verbatim; nothing to audit. (b) impeccable unavailable — Phase 2's critique/audit arms and Phase 6's report render require it. Per the Phase 0 carve-out, the run continues in degraded mode (VISION pass, SEO/technical, LLM visibility, benchmarks all still fire) and writes audit.json; then stop and tell the user the designed report needs the impeccable plugin — deliver the data, not a hand-templated substitute.

Everything else degrades per the ladder; the audit never stops for confirmation in normal flow.

Outputs

stardust/
├── current/                             ← from extract (reused when <7 days old)
│   ├── _brand-extraction.json
│   ├── brand-review.html                ← Tensions section = Phase 1 input
│   ├── pages/<slug>.json
│   └── assets/screenshots/<slug>.png    ← VISION-pass + report evidence figures
└── audit/
    └── <domain-slug>/                   ← hostname, www-stripped, dots → dashes
        ├── audit.json                   ← scorecard, measurements, findings[], provenance
        └── report.html                  ← craft-rendered, self-contained

stardust/rollout/optimize/findings.json  ← appended via findings.mjs (rollout projects only)

Audit writes no state.json entries — extraction state belongs to extract; audit's own artifacts are self-describing via provenance. Re-running audit against a fresh extraction overwrites stardust/audit/<domain-slug>/; ledger recordings dedupe by the ledger's own id hash.

Scope

• Audits and prescribes; never modifies the site or its redesign artifacts.
• One origin per run. Auditing a competitor set is N runs.
• The natural continuations: $stardust uplift <url> (the closing directions are its variant briefs), the stardust direct skill (findings feed the Phase 2.5 improvements list), rollout's optimize loop (ledger findings with known check ids autofix on AEM).

References

• reference/scoring.md — the seven dimensions, weights, observable anchors at 40/70/90, scoring procedure.
• reference/report-format.md — audit.json schema (Part 1) and the report.html craft brief + post-render validation (Part 2).
• ../extract/SKILL.md — crawl, capture, brand-surface extraction; § Failure modes for the anti-synthesis discipline.
• ../extract/reference/brand-review-template.md § Tensions — the T-* detector catalog Phase 1 carries forward.
• ../prototype/SKILL.md § Invoking impeccable — the skill-invocation delegation mechanic reused for critique (Phase 2) and the report render (Phase 6).
• ../rollout/reference/audit-sources.md — the findings-ledger normalization rules (severity, fixability) Phase 6 applies.
• ../rollout/reference/checks.md — baseline check ids to reuse so AEM autofix picks the findings up.
• ../rollout/scripts/findings.mjs — the ledger writer (record).
• ../uplift/SKILL.md § The three-variant role contract — the frame for the closing uplift directions.
• ../prototype/reference/motion-registers.md § Selection heuristic — register suggestion for direction C.
• ../direct/SKILL.md § Phase 2.5 — the improvements list audit findings feed on a subsequent redesign.
• ../deploy/da-deploy-protocol.md — the DA transport behind --deploy (source PUT → preview → live; no block conversion).
• ../stardust/SKILL.md § Setup — master-skill setup run in Phase 0.
• ../stardust/reference/artifact-map.md — provenance shapes.