GrowSight: A Local AI Website Auditor for Small Businesses

This is a submission for the "Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 2: Side Hustle" (https://dev.to/challenges/hacktoberfest-week2-2026-10-12).

GrowSight: A Local AI Website Auditor for Small Businesses

A website can look perfectly fine and still lose potential customers.

Maybe the call-to-action is unclear. Maybe the mobile experience needs improvement. Maybe the business is missing a feature that could make it easier for customers to buy, book, or get in touch.

For small businesses, figuring out what to fix can be expensive and time-consuming.

That's why I built GrowSight — an AI-powered website auditing tool that helps businesses identify potential usability issues and discover practical opportunities to improve their websites.

My goal is simple: make useful website analysis more accessible to businesses that cannot afford expensive consultants.

What I Built

GrowSight takes a public website URL and analyzes the page to identify potential improvements.

It examines website structure, content, calls to action, accessibility signals, and desktop and mobile layouts. It then combines automated checks with AI-assisted analysis to turn observations into actionable recommendations.

Some of the things it checks include:

• Page titles, metadata, and headings
• Buttons, links, and calls to action
• Images and missing alternative text
• Desktop and mobile website layouts
• Potential usability improvements
• Features a business might consider adding to improve the customer experience

Rather than simply listing technical problems, GrowSight aims to help answer a more useful question:

What should I improve on my website next, and why?

The tool is designed with freelancers, local businesses, independent creators, and small online stores in mind.

These recommendations are suggestions to investigate, not guaranteed increases in revenue or conversions.

Demo

🎥 Watch the GrowSight demo:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Rjo7K7DuMkV2DFnJc6maXphEYbbKa3n3/view?usp=drivesdk

The recording demonstrates my project running locally on my Fedora laptop.

Code

GitHub repository: https://github.com/Astra5155j/growsight-gemma

The repository contains the frontend, backend API, browser-scanning logic, AI integration, and tests.

How I Built It

I wanted to build something useful with open-weight AI rather than just wrap a hosted chatbot in a user interface.

Here's the stack behind GrowSight:

• Frontend: HTML, CSS, and vanilla JavaScript
• Backend: Python and FastAPI
• Browser automation: Playwright
• AI model: Gemma 3 4B
• Local inference: Ollama
• Visual analysis: Website screenshots processed through the vision-capable model when enabled

The workflow starts with a URL. Playwright opens the website and collects information about its structure and appearance, including desktop and mobile screenshots. Rule-based checks identify straightforward issues, while the AI integration uses the collected evidence to help generate recommendations.

The application is designed to run on a personal computer instead of requiring a dedicated cloud AI service.

This is an early MVP, and I still have work to do on scan reliability, recommendation quality, and testing the usefulness of the suggestions with real business owners.

Why Does Open Innovation Matter?

For a tool aimed at small businesses, the economics matter.

If every audit requires a paid AI API call, recurring costs can make experimentation and long-term use more difficult. Depending entirely on one provider can also limit how a project evolves.

Running Gemma locally gives GrowSight a different starting point.

1. Lower marginal AI inference costs

Once the model is downloaded, local inference does not require a separate paid AI API for every request. Hardware, electricity, and maintenance still have costs, but there is no per-request fee charged by an external model API.

1. More control over data

The AI inference can happen on the user's own machine instead of sending collected audit evidence to a third-party AI API. The website still needs to be accessed to scan a live public URL, but the AI component can remain local.

1. Freedom to experiment

I can change prompts, modify the auditing logic, and explore different compatible models without rebuilding the entire application around a proprietary AI provider.

1. A path toward offline AI

The model can perform inference locally without an external AI API. Scanning a live website still requires internet access, so the entire workflow is not fully offline.

For me, open innovation is not just about using a free model. It is about having the freedom to experiment, understand the system, and build a useful product without making a closed AI service the centre of everything.

What I Learned

Building GrowSight made me think about the difference between a generic AI answer and an AI system grounded in actual evidence.

A model can produce convincing recommendations, but useful website analysis needs context: what the page contains, how it is structured, what users can click, and how the layout behaves on different screens.

Combining browser automation, deterministic checks, and local AI gives me a foundation to explore that problem.

It also made one thing clear: generating recommendations is only the beginning. The real test is whether a business owner finds them useful enough to act on.

What's Next?

My next priorities are to improve scan reliability, make recommendations more specific to different business types, improve visual comparisons, and get feedback from real website owners.

Eventually, I want GrowSight to become a practical tool that helps a small business owner identify what deserves attention first, rather than leaving them with a long list of generic suggestions.

I'm building toward a simple idea:

Your website should work for your business, not just exist online.

My First User

I am looking to get GrowSight in front of small business owners and learn which recommendations are genuinely useful to them.

I haven't included any claims about paying customers or measured revenue improvements because those need to come from real usage.

If you run a small business or know someone who does, I'd love to hear what you would want a tool like this to identify on your website.