WellCited vs doing it manually

Can you just do this yourself?

Yes, entirely. There is no secret method in this product. The whole rubric is published on the landing page with each check's point value and its remedy, three of the generators run free on this site with no account, and everything else is a text file and a script tag.

That is a strange thing for a paid product to say, so here is the reasoning: the checks are deterministic and publishing them is what makes the score worth trusting. If reading them is enough for you, read them and go fix your site.

What does the manual version actually cost?

For one site, once, an afternoon — if you already know what you are looking for. Read robots.txt and resolve which of the nine AI crawlers it admits. Write an llms.txt from your real page list. Write an Organization block and validate it. Read your three most important pages' headings and rewrite the nouns as questions. Deploy. Re-fetch everything to confirm it is being served the way you think it is.

The writing is not the expensive part. The finding and the re-checking are.

What breaks about doing it by hand?

Three things, all of them a matter of time rather than skill:

• Drift. robots.txt is edited by whoever ships the next security plugin, a framework upgrade can move a page from server-rendered to client-rendered, and neither change announces itself. Most sites that block AI crawlers did not decide to.
• Re-checking. A fix is only real once the deployed page changed. Nobody re-fetches four files by hand on a schedule, which means the manual version is accurate on the day you did it.
• The engine half. You cannot hold prompt wording still across months by hand, and a prompt that moves between runs makes the trend meaningless — the movement you are reading is your own edit.

When is manual the right answer?

One site, one time, and you already understand the checks. Run the free audit, fix what it lists, re-run it to confirm, and buy nothing. That path is genuinely open and it is why the audit has no account wall.

Buy the product when the thing you are short of is repetition: several sites, or one site that keeps changing, or a monthly number about what the engines say that has to be comparable to last month's.