RankCLI vs Lighthouse CI
Lighthouse CI runs Google's Lighthouse on URLs you list and fails the build on scores or budgets. RankCLI crawls a site, runs 280+ SEO and AI-search checks, fails the build the same way, and can open the fix as a pull request. They overlap on CI gating and little else; most teams that use one can use both.
Facts checked 2026-10-14
12 aspects
| Aspect | RankCLI | Lighthouse CI |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | An SEO and AI-search linter for developers: 280+ checks from the CLI, a GitHub Action and an MCP server, with fixes as pull requests. | "A suite of tools that make continuously running, saving, retrieving, and asserting against Lighthouse results as easy as possible."[1] |
| Licence and source | Free npm packages under MIT (@rankcli/cli, @rankcli/agent-runtime, @rankcli/mcp-server). The GitHub Action and MCP server repositories are public; the CLI source is not yet published as a repository. | Apache-2.0, by Google. 7,110 GitHub stars; v0.15.1 is the latest release.[1] |
| Price | CLI, Action, MCP server and local fixes are free with no account. Hosted: Free (1 site, weekly), Solo $9/mo, Pro $29/mo ($19 founding for the first 100), Agency $99/mo; every plan runs all 280+ checks. | Free. Results upload to temporary public storage (deleted after a few days), to a Lighthouse CI server you host, or to the filesystem.[2] |
| Install and run | npx @rankcli/cli audit --url https://your-site.dev. Action integrallis/rankcli-action@v1 (public repository; Marketplace listing pending). MCP: npx @rankcli/mcp-server, 15 tools. Agent skills: npx skills add integrallis/rankcli-mcp-server. Hosted dashboard at rankcli.dev. | npm install -g @lhci/cli, then lhci autorun. GitHub Action: the community treosh/lighthouse-ci-action (not published by Google). Self-hosted server via Docker image or npx lhci server. No MCP server or agent skill stated.[3] |
| What it audits | 280+ checks: crawlability, indexability, on-page, content, links, Core Web Vitals heuristics, security headers, structured data, local SEO, social, accessibility, AI readiness. Multi-page crawl, --max-pages N (default 5). | Lighthouse's categories: performance (lab metrics and budgets), accessibility, best practices, SEO. The SEO category in Lighthouse 12.6.1, which @lhci/cli 0.15.1 pins, has 11 audits (title, meta description, crawlable, canonical, hreflang, robots.txt, link text, image alt, HTTP status, structured data as a manual item). No crawl: you list the URLs, or it audits each HTML file in a static directory.[5] |
| AI search (GEO) checks | AI crawler access tested by fetching as each crawler and comparing with a browser (catches CDN-level blocks robots.txt cannot show), llms.txt, citation-worthiness, answer structure, E-E-A-T, RAG chunk readiness, entity and brand checks. | None in the pinned Lighthouse 12.6.1. Lighthouse 13.5 adds llms.txt, agent accessibility tree, WebMCP and ard-schema audits, but Lighthouse CI 0.15.1 does not ship it.[5] |
| CI gating | --fail-on error|warning|notice and --min-score N; exit 0 pass, 1 gate failed, 2 bad invocation, 3 site unreachable, so a down site never passes. The Action posts a PR comment and can alert Slack or Discord. README badge on the hosted Free plan. No SARIF output. | Assertions at off, warn or error with minScore, maxLength and maxNumericValue, presets, and budget files; error exits non-zero. GitHub status checks through the LHCI GitHub App or a token. No PR comments, SARIF or badges stated.[2] |
| Fixes | rankcli fix applies fixes locally (--dry-run, --only CODES), free. Hosted auto-fix pull requests through the RankCLI GitHub App: 3 a month on Free, unlimited on paid plans, with per-site open-PR limits. | Reports contain Lighthouse's recommendations. No fix application or pull requests stated.[1] |
| Monitoring and history | Hosted: scheduled audits (weekly on Free, daily and on every push on Pro), history, weekly email report, Slack and Discord alerts on Solo and up. Search Console sync is built but not yet enabled. | A self-hosted server keeps history, shows trends and diffs builds. Scheduling, alerts and Search Console are not stated; temporary public storage keeps no history.[4] |
| AI model use | The checks are deterministic and need no model. Optional AI analysis runs on your model only: Apple Intelligence on-device on a Mac that has it, else Ollama or LM Studio, else your own OpenRouter, OpenAI, Anthropic, Groq, Gemini or DeepSeek key. Nothing goes through RankCLI. | None stated.[1] |
| Frameworks | Detects 32 frameworks (94% on a 51-site corpus); fix recipes for 11; build-time plugins astro-rankcli, vite-plugin-rankcli and next-rankcli; framework guides at /seo. | None; staticDistDir for static output, startServerCommand for servers; CI walkthroughs for GitHub Actions, Travis, CircleCI, GitLab, Jenkins and Cloud Build.[3] |
| Limits worth knowing | No headless browser: pages are audited as served, which is what crawlers see first, so client-rendered content is reported as such rather than rendered. Performance is heuristic, not Lighthouse lab metrics. First public release in 2026. | Per-URL, no crawl. Three runs per URL by default to tame variance. Public storage is readable by anyone with the link; the server accepts data from anyone with HTTP access unless you add auth.[3] |
Pick Lighthouse CI when
- •You want Lighthouse's own performance and accessibility scores, with budgets, as a CI gate.
- •You already run Lighthouse and need history and build diffs on infrastructure you host.
- •Your SEO needs stop at titles, descriptions, canonicals and crawlability.
Pick RankCLI when
- •You want the SEO and AI-search checks Lighthouse does not run: structured data validation, security headers, AI crawler access at the CDN, llms.txt, citation-readiness.
- •You want a crawl of the site, not a list of URLs, and a PR comment with the findings.
- •You want the fix opened as a pull request, or applied locally with rankcli fix.
- •You want an MCP server so Claude Code or Cursor can run the checks.
See the RankCLI side for yourself, free and without an account:
npx @rankcli/cli audit -u https://your-site.devSources
Every Lighthouse CI fact above was read from these pages on 2026-10-14. If something has changed since, tell us and we will correct it.