Quickstart Tutorial

Audit Your First Website#

Run sparrow audit with the target website URL. Let's start with a small crawl limit of 50 pages:

sparrow audit https://example.com --max-pages 50

Black Sparrow immediately starts crawling:

• Probes /robots.txt and discovers XML sitemaps.
• Normalizes internal URLs and enqueues them.
• Streams HTML without buffering DOM trees into memory.
• Monitors server response times and adjusts speed automatically with AIMD congestion control.

Read the Live Terminal Summary#

Once the audit finishes, Black Sparrow displays an ANSI terminal summary:

================================================================================
                           BLACK SPARROW AUDIT SUMMARY
================================================================================
Target URL       : https://example.com
Session ID       : crawl_20260915_a7f9b2
Pages Crawled    : 50
Total Duration   : 1.42s (~35.2 pages/sec)
Health Score     : 94 / 100 (Grade: A)
 
Findings Breakdown:
  [CRITICAL]     : 0
  [ALERT]        : 2 (Broken internal link, Missing title tag)
  [WARNING]      : 5 (Missing image alt text, Short meta description)
  [INFO]         : 12 (Canonical tag self-referencing)
 
Reports saved to : ./reports/crawl_20260915_a7f9b2.{json,md}

Inspect a Single URL Instantly#

When you're editing code locally or troubleshooting a specific URL, you don't need to crawl the whole site. Use sparrow inspect to get an instant X-ray of that URL:

sparrow inspect https://example.com/pricing

This checks:

• HTTP Status Code & Time To First Byte (TTFB)
• <title> and <meta name="description">
• OpenGraph & Twitter Cards
• H1–H6 heading hierarchy
• Structured Data / JSON-LD schemas
• Missing image alt attributes or missing width/height

Generate an Interactive HTML Dashboard#

Want a visual report you can share with clients or teammates? Run:

sparrow report crawl_20260915_a7f9b2 -f html -o ./reports

Open ./reports/crawl_20260915_a7f9b2.html in your browser. You get an interactive dashboard complete with:

• Health score gauge
• Category tabs (Status, Meta, Images, Links, Security)
• Searchable, filterable issue tables
• Internal PageRank equity distribution

Check AI Search Readiness#

Want to know if search engines powered by AI (Perplexity, ChatGPT, Claude) can read and cite your website?

sparrow check-ai https://example.com

This verifies:

• Whether /llms.txt or /llms-full.txt exists.
• Whether your robots.txt blocks or permits AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot).
• Whether Cloudflare or WAF challenge screens are blocking AI bots.