Built because
talkers got hired.

We had hired one too many SEOs whose interview was a masterclass and whose audit was a disappointment. The pattern was always the same: fluent in the vocabulary, shaky on the practice. We needed a way to test for the latter without slowing the hiring process to a crawl.

So we built a deliberately broken e-commerce site, planted sixty-odd SEO issues across every layer of it, and asked candidates to find as many as they could. Within three months we had stopped second-guessing our shortlist. The signal was that strong.

We made it public because the SEO industry, broadly, deserves a better filter than the interview. Junior SEOs deserve a way to demonstrate skill that doesn't depend on connections. Senior SEOs deserve a benchmark that isn't "years of experience." Companies deserve a hiring signal that isn't fluency in vocabulary.

The test site blocks crawlers, audit suites, and AI agents at the network level — by design. If we let people pipe the test through GPTBot or paste in a Sitebulb report, the credential would measure tool ownership, not auditing skill. Manual-only is what makes the result mean something.

We pay for the registry ourselves and accept no sponsorship from SEO tooling vendors — partly to stay neutral, and partly because the credential is about reading a page well, not about which tool you happened to subscribe to.