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Message: [QUOTE="Borrowdale Barron, post: 90431, member: 6"] Right, from the top. Signal Controller is a desktop program for people whose job is looking after websites. Agencies, publishers, in-house SEO people, anyone who owns a site big enough that they can't hold all of it in their head anymore. The problem it exists for is not a shortage of data. Everyone drowns in data already. Search Console, analytics, crawlers, backlink tools, spreadsheets from three different vendors. What nobody has is a straight answer to the only question that matters. Given all of that, what should I actually change on Tuesday morning, and did last month's change work? Here's the version I wrote on a sticky note and stuck above the desk. Search Console is a reporting tool. You look, you learn, you leave. It's the end of the road. Signal Controller is meant to be the start of one. Concretely, it swallows your evidence, works out what's actually wrong, turns that into specific pieces of work assigned to specific people, and then goes back later to check whether the fix took effect. That last part is the bit nobody else does. Every tool on the market will tell you a page is underperforming and then never mention it again. It didn't start this big. It started as one narrow thing: internal linking. Which of your own pages should link to which other pages, using what anchor text, and why. That's a hard problem, graph mathematics over your own site rather than opinion, and it's still the core of the product. But once you've built machinery that understands a site as a graph, the neighbouring problems start looking solvable, and the scope grew into a full enterprise SEO suite. The spine of the design is one sentence I keep coming back to. An imported observation becomes a canonical site subject, which becomes a finding, which becomes a decision, which becomes work, which becomes a verified outcome. Six links, called the identity chain. Every feature in the product exists to hold one of those links together. If a feature breaks the chain, it's wrong even if it works perfectly. That's a written rule, not a mood. The user-facing side is deliberately four screens rather than forty. The Evidence Grid is the dense analytical workbench where you curate data, a spreadsheet that understands URLs. Living Site is the spatial view, pages and topics and links laid out so you can see the shape of the thing. Work Graph holds the queue, the dependencies, the timeline, and the capacity maths. Inspector answers "tell me everything about the one thing I've selected." Four surfaces, because tile dashboards are where insight goes to die. The first slice that has to work before anything else matters is written down precisely. Import one workbook, map its columns, canonicalise its URLs, investigate the typed rows, promote selected findings into work, assign them, verify completion, write the outcome back into the grid. Not spreadsheet parity. That one loop, working properly. There's a rule inside the Evidence Grid I'm oddly proud of. A missing row must never be treated automatically as a negative result. If a query is absent from a search report that doesn't prove rejection, it might just mean nobody asked that month. So the grid keeps observation, inference, and conclusion as three visibly different things. Most tools mash all three into one number and call it insight. Now the honest part, since you asked whether it works. The capability inventory currently reads 372 numbered commitments, zero complete, twelve partial. The twelve partials are all pre-existing prototype work. Search, a command palette, tables, long-running jobs, exports, accessibility, terminology. None of it is progress against the real scope. Two of the three engines in there, the Evidence Grid and the Work Graph, are each individually the size of a commercial product on their own. So it's a multi-year programme, not a weekend. I keep that "0 complete" line visible on purpose. The moment you let yourself round it up, you've started lying to yourself about where you are, and that's the failure mode that kills projects like this. [/QUOTE]

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