Your website is mostly photographs, and almost nothing that decides whether a client finds you is. This grades the parts a search crawler or an AI assistant reads before anyone sees a single frame of your work, and it prints the fix under each item. Free, no signup, and nothing in it judges your photography.
Run the free tool ↓Enter the address of the page you actually send inquiries to, a homepage or a wedding or portrait page, and the report comes back in about twenty seconds. No email required, and you can run a second page straight after.
Six categories get graded from one page of your live site, with the fix printed under every item that does not pass. The mechanics live on the main Website Report Card page. What follows is which checks tend to decide the result when the business is photography.
A good result on a photography site looks lopsided, and some of the highs are cheap. Security rests on one check, so an A there means you are on HTTPS and nothing more. Mobile viewport passes on essentially any modern portfolio template. Performance is capped below an A by design, so read that one as information, not a verdict on your speed.
Structured data and AI readiness are the quiet ones on a photography site: the galleries look flawless on your laptop while the page says nothing machine-readable about who you are or where you shoot.
One quirk lands hardest on photographers. The grader reads the HTML your server sends, so a portfolio painted in by JavaScript is not in it, and the alt text figure can be counted from a handful of images instead of hundreds. Read Page weight the same way: it sizes your HTML document, not your JPEGs. The image weight that slows a gallery sits behind the PageSpeed link in your Performance card.
Say a wedding photographer grades her homepage. Mobile viewport and HTTPS pass. Image alt text warns, reporting the share of her images carrying alt text, because the hero and three featured galleries went up straight from her catalog. Title tag warns, quoted back at her, because it is her studio name and nothing else. Meta description fails, missing. Schema markup and business schema both fail, since the template shipped no JSON-LD at all. Social (Open Graph) warns. Most of that list is an afternoon of writing, and the two schema items are why the local schema generator exists.
Imagine a family portrait photographer whose galleries load with JavaScript. Her card comes back thin, because most of what she publishes is not in the HTML that gets fetched. Her AI crawler access check fails, and she knows exactly why: she wrote those robots.txt rules herself, to keep her photographs out of training sets. The first is a platform question, not a setting. The second is a decision, covered next.
The card is a structural read, not a marketing plan. What books dates is narrower: pages naming the genres and places you shoot, enough written detail that a client comparing three photographers can tell you apart, and reviews doing work the portfolio cannot. That argument lives on the photographer page.
AI readiness deserves its own note, because photographers get shortlisted inside chat answers now. Someone asks an assistant for a documentary-style wedding photographer in their city, or one who does in-home newborn sessions, and a few names come back. Google sells ads in and around those answers, so there is budget in that space. What no budget buys is a place in the organic answer itself, and a site of photographs with almost no text gives the engine nothing to name you for. That is the target of the machine-readable content check, the llms.txt generator, and our AI search work.
If you block AI crawlers deliberately, the tradeoff is yours. The rule that keeps your images out of a training set also keeps you out of that answer. The card flags it either way, so the choice is in front of you.
Most of what the card flags is free to fix yourself. Alt text, a title, a meta description, and Open Graph tags are writing, not development, and the two hardest items have free generators. What is not quick is a platform that cannot serve your portfolio as readable HTML. That is a rebuild question.
For that, custom website builds run $3,500 to $12,000+ one-time, and ongoing SEO or Local SEO runs $1,500 to $3,500/month for most businesses, $3,500 to $7,500/month in competitive metros or multi-location work. Everything is month to month, and you own the site, the content, and the accounts. Longer answers live in the guides on what a website costs and what SEO costs, or run the what should you pay tool for photographers and the AI visibility checker for photographers, free like this one. There are more than 50 free tools here, no email wall.
No. Nothing in it looks at your work. It reads what your server sends: the tags in your head, the alt attributes on your images, the JSON-LD, your robots.txt and your llms.txt. An average shooter on a well-built site grades higher than a brilliant one on a bare template. It reports on the container, not the pictures.
Because the page is fetched once, the way a crawler receives it, and only that HTML gets graded. Anything a script paints in afterward is not there yet, so lazy-loaded galleries go uncounted and the alt text figure comes from the few images in the markup. Worth knowing rather than working around, since crawlers and AI engines read the same thing.
Both, one at a time. The card reads a single page, so a homepage result tells you nothing about the wedding page you send inquiries to. Titles, descriptions, and alt text are per page, so the fix list changes with each run. Start with whatever page gets shared and linked most, then run the one your referrals point at.
Yes. The check reads robots.txt and flags rules blocking GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, or Google-Extended, whether you meant them or not. The tradeoff is honest: the same rule protects your photographs and keeps you out of the organic answer when someone asks an assistant for a photographer nearby. Ads do run in and around those answers, but no budget decides who the organic answer names.
Yes, and either LocalBusiness or Organization markup satisfies that check. Plenty of photographers work from a home office and travel to every job, and schema handles it: you can publish the areas you serve without publishing a street address. What to avoid is a page carrying nothing at all that states who you are and where you shoot.
Results are held for a day, so a run right after your edit hands back the earlier one. Come back tomorrow. If the letter has not moved, look at where you made the change: a caption typed into your gallery app is not always an alt attribute in the served HTML. And alt text fixed on another gallery page will not move this one.
Website Report Card: full tool page and methodology · Marketing for photographers · AI Visibility Checker for Photographers · What Should You Pay? for Photographers · All free tools
Send the page over and I will walk your report card with you, or show you what a rebuilt version would look like first. Orlando based, working with local service businesses nationwide since 2008, and the mockup is free.
Book a free consultation → Or call/text directly: (407) 694-2055Tell us a little about the business and we will come back with an honest read: what we would fix first, what it costs, and whether you need us at all. Prefer to see work before you talk numbers? Get a free homepage mockup, built for your business, yours to keep either way.
Brandon reads every one of these himself. You will hear back shortly with an honest read on what we would do first, what it costs, and whether it is worth it for you.