Sitebulb

Sitebulb is the website crawling and SEO auditing tool Patrick Hathaway and Gareth Hoyle bootstrapped from Brighton, UK in 2017. Unlike cloud-based SEO audit tools that throttle crawl speed, Sitebulb runs as a desktop application that uses your own machine's CPU and internet connection to crawl websites at full speed — making it dramatically faster for large sites. The product grew to $3M+ ARR with a team of 10 by serving mid-to-senior SEO consultants and in-house SEO teams at established companies. Sitebulb's visualization approach set it apart: crawl results are displayed as interactive sunburst charts, tree maps, and network graphs that let SEOs spot patterns in large site architectures that spreadsheets would obscure. The "Hints" system — 300+ SEO checks each with a severity rating, detailed explanation, and actionable recommendation — means even non-expert users understand what to fix and why. Technical SEO agencies became Sitebulb's most vocal advocates, recommending it in every "best SEO tools" comparison and driving word-of-mouth that made paid acquisition unnecessary.