The written teardown.

A teardown is a written read of one website: what it tells a buyer, what a search engine can index, and what an answer engine can quote back. It costs nothing and it ends with three fixes you can hand to a developer.

What arrives

• A 15-minute video walkthrough of your site, recorded, not live.
• Three specific fixes, in writing, with the page and the reason for each.
• Inside 48 hours of the form. No pitch deck, no slides.

Ask for one on the start here form. One site per request. If the answer is that your site is fine, that is what the teardown says.

If you saw VikramaTeardown in your logs

That was this crawler reading your site for a teardown, either because you asked for one or because we were preparing to send you one unprompted. Every number below is read from the crawler source, not described from memory.

The user agent

VikramaTeardown/0.1 (+https://vikrama.studio/teardown; audit bot; obeys robots.txt)

What it requests

A probe runs first. Seven requests at most, in this order, and every one of them after the first is asked for only if your robots.txt allows it:

1. /robots.txt
2. The sitemap named on the first Sitemap: line of your robots.txt, or /sitemap.xml if no line names one. One request. A sitemap you named is fetched whatever your rules say, because that line exists to point crawlers at it; the guessed /sitemap.xml is only fetched where your rules allow it. If it is a sitemap index, the children are counted as child sitemaps and never as pages.
3. /llms.txt
4. One path that should not exist, /vikrama-teardown-probe-<timestamp>, to see whether your server answers a missing page with a real 404 or with a 200.
5. The www or apex counterpart of your homepage, redirects not followed.
6. Your homepage, redirects not followed.
7. Your homepage again, following redirects.

The crawl follows. Defaults are at most 40 pages and 400 ms between requests. Pages are found from the homepage, from the sitemap, and from internal links on pages already read. Where the sitemap is an index, at most five child sitemaps are read for seeds.

How it treats robots.txt

The user agent string claims the crawler obeys robots.txt, so it does. Rules are matched against the token before the slash, VikramaTeardown, and against User-agent: *. Your robots.txt is read first, and then every later request, in the probe above as well as in the crawl, is checked against your rules before it is sent. A disallowed path is recorded as skipped and never fetched, and the reading it would have produced is reported as not measured rather than as a zero.

Per RFC 9309, a 4xx on robots.txt means no rules apply, so the crawl is unrestricted. A 5xx, or a 429, means the whole site is treated as disallowed: no page is read at all, and the only finding is that your robots.txt is answering with a server error. A site that disallows everything therefore sees two requests from this crawler, not seven: your robots.txt, and the sitemap you declared in it.

Timeouts and retries

15 seconds to connect, 30 seconds for the whole request. Six redirect hops at most. One retry, and only where a retry can help: a timeout or a 5xx. A 4xx is an answer rather than a failure, so it is never retried.

What is kept

Per page: the final URL, HTTP status, response time, byte count, the redirect chain, the title, meta description, canonical, robots meta and X-Robots-Tag, headings, image attributes, JSON-LD blocks, word count, Open Graph tags, and the links found on the page. Copies of your pages are not written to disk. The teardown goes to you and to nobody else, and no part of it is sold.

Removal

Email hello@vikrama.studio with your domain and ask for removal. The run output for that domain is deleted within 10 business days and the domain is not crawled again. No reason needed.

The second crawler is the research index. It is documented on the research page.