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Market Research Toolkit

The Market Research toolkit combines powerful website auditing with marketing psychology frameworks to help you understand, optimize, and improve digital experiences.

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What is the Market Research Toolkit?

This toolkit provides AI agents with two specialized capabilities:
  1. Website Auditing: Comprehensive technical and marketing analysis powered by the squirrelscan CLI
  2. Marketing Psychology: Application of 70+ mental models and behavioral science principles to marketing decisions
Together, these capabilities enable deep analysis of websites from both technical and psychological perspectives, providing actionable insights for improvement.

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Key Capabilities

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Website Auditing (230+ Rules)

The toolkit audits websites across 21 categories with over 230 automated rules:
  • Meta tags, titles, and descriptions
  • Canonical URLs and Open Graph tags
  • Keyword optimization (without stuffing)
  • URL structure and naming conventions
  • Crawlability and robots.txt configuration
  • Sitemap.xml validation
  • Schema.org markup and structured data
  • E-E-A-T (Expertise, Experience, Authority, Trustworthiness)
  • Broken links (internal and external)
  • Redirect chains and loops
  • Page speed and load time
  • Mobile-friendliness and responsive design
  • Resource usage and caching
  • Image optimization (size, format, compression)
  • Heading structure and hierarchy
  • Content organization and readability
  • Image alt text completeness
  • Video accessibility and VideoObject schema
  • Leaked secrets detection
  • HTTPS usage and mixed content warnings
  • Security headers
  • Legal compliance (privacy policies, terms of service)
  • Accessibility (WCAG compliance)
  • Color contrast and keyboard navigation
  • Form validation and error handling
  • User flow optimization
  • Touch-friendly elements for mobile
  • Open Graph and Twitter Card validation
  • Social media schema and snippets
  • NAP (Name, Address, Phone) consistency
  • Geo metadata for local SEO
Each audit provides:
  • Overall health score (0-100) with letter grades
  • Category breakdowns for focused improvements
  • Specific issues with affected URLs
  • Severity levels (error, warning, notice) and impact rankings (1-10)
  • Actionable recommendations for fixing issues

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Marketing Psychology (70+ Mental Models)

The toolkit applies proven psychological principles to marketing decisions:

Foundational Thinking

First Principles, Jobs to Be Done, Circle of Competence, Inversion, Occam’s Razor, Pareto Principle, Theory of Constraints, Opportunity Cost, and more

Buyer Psychology

Mere Exposure Effect, Availability Heuristic, Confirmation Bias, Mimetic Desire, Endowment Effect, IKEA Effect, Present Bias, Status-Quo Bias, and more

Persuasion Principles

Reciprocity, Commitment & Consistency, Authority Bias, Social Proof, Scarcity/Urgency, Loss Aversion, Anchoring, Framing Effect, and more

Pricing Psychology

Charm Pricing, Left-Digit Effect, Rule of 100, Good-Better-Best, Mental Accounting, Price Relativity, and more

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Who Should Use This Toolkit?

The Market Research toolkit is designed for:

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Marketers

  • Audit marketing websites for SEO and conversion optimization
  • Apply psychological principles to messaging and positioning
  • Improve landing pages using behavioral science
  • Understand why customers buy and how to influence decisions ethically

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Developers

  • Identify and fix technical SEO issues
  • Validate accessibility and mobile-friendliness
  • Debug broken links and redirect chains
  • Ensure security best practices
  • Optimize page performance and resource loading

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Product Teams

  • Analyze competitor websites
  • Apply Jobs to Be Done framework to product positioning
  • Reduce friction in user onboarding
  • Design better pricing strategies
  • Build features that leverage psychological principles

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Content Creators

  • Fix content structure and heading hierarchy
  • Add missing alt text and meta descriptions
  • Improve E-E-A-T signals
  • Optimize for search engines and social sharing

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Core Components

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1. squirrelscan CLI

The squirrel command-line tool provides the auditing engine:
  • Cross-platform: Available for macOS, Windows, and Linux
  • Browser emulation: Renders pages like real browsers and search crawlers
  • Local database: Caches results for fast re-analysis and regression tracking
  • Flexible output: Console, LLM-optimized, JSON, HTML, Markdown, and more
  • Configurable coverage: Quick, surface, or full audits depending on your needs
The CLI is designed to work seamlessly with AI agents, providing structured, token-efficient output formats optimized for LLM consumption.

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2. AI Agent Skills

Two specialized agent skills provide high-level capabilities: audit-website skill: Handles the complete audit workflow:
  • Installation and setup of squirrel CLI
  • Running audits with appropriate coverage modes
  • Interpreting results and prioritizing fixes
  • Parallelizing fixes across multiple agents for speed
  • Iterating until health scores reach target levels (typically 85-95+)
  • Regression testing to detect new issues
marketing-psychology skill: Applies mental models to marketing:
  • Identifies relevant psychological principles for specific situations
  • Explains the science behind buyer behavior
  • Provides concrete marketing applications
  • Ensures ethical implementation of persuasion techniques
  • Tailors recommendations to product context when available

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3. Mental Models Library

The toolkit includes 70+ mental models organized into categories:
  • Foundational Thinking Models: Strategy, problem-solving, and decision frameworks
  • Understanding Buyers: Cognitive biases and behavioral patterns
  • Influencing Behavior: Ethical persuasion and behavior change
  • Pricing Psychology: How people perceive and respond to prices
  • Design & Delivery: Creating effective marketing systems
  • Growth & Scaling: Models for sustainable, compounding growth

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How It Works Together

The power of this toolkit comes from combining technical auditing with psychological insights:
  1. Audit a website to identify technical issues, broken user flows, and optimization opportunities
  2. Apply psychology to understand why issues matter and how to fix them effectively
  3. Implement fixes guided by both technical best practices and behavioral science
  4. Re-audit to verify improvements and catch any regressions
  5. Iterate until the site achieves optimal health and conversion performance
The toolkit emphasizes ethical application of psychological principles. All persuasion techniques should be used to genuinely help customers make better decisions, not to manipulate or deceive.

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Example Workflow

Here’s how the toolkit might be used to improve a landing page: 
1. Run website audit
   → Discovers: slow load time, missing H1, weak meta description, 
                no social proof, broken mobile layout

2. Apply psychology frameworks
   → Identifies: High activation energy (friction), no social proof,
                missing scarcity/urgency, unclear value proposition

3. Implement fixes
   → Technical: Fix mobile CSS, optimize images, add H1, expand meta
   → Psychological: Add testimonials (social proof), simplify form (reduce friction),
                   add "limited spots" (scarcity), clarify outcome (Jobs to Be Done)

4. Re-audit
   → Score improved from 68 (D) to 92 (A)
   → All critical issues resolved

5. Monitor conversions
   → Track whether combined technical + psychological improvements 
     drive better results

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Getting Started

Ready to audit your first website? Continue to the Quickstart Guide to install the toolkit and run your first audit.

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Additional Resources

  • squirrelscan Documentation: docs.squirrelscan.com
  • Rule Reference: Look up any audit rule at https://docs.squirrelscan.com/rules/{category}/{rule-id}
  • squirrelscan Website: squirrelscan.com
Always audit live websites when possible. Only production environments provide true representation of performance, rendering, and real user experience. Local development servers may not reflect actual issues.

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