A Domain Is More Than Its Pages
When you crawl a website, you are not just collecting content — you are mapping a graph. Every internal link is a relationship between pages. Every external link is a relationship between domains. Every broken link is a signal of neglect. Every outbound reference to a competitor or partner is a piece of strategic intelligence.
The Spectre Domain Suite analyses these relationships and surfaces them in structured, actionable form. It is the layer of Project Spectre that goes beyond content extraction into domain intelligence.
Link Health Scanning
The most immediately useful feature of the Domain Suite is link health scanning. The scanner crawls your domain (or a target domain), follows every internal link, and categorises each one:
- Healthy — returns a 200 OK response
- Redirected — returns a 301/302; the final destination is recorded
- Broken — returns a 404 or 5xx; flagged for remediation
- External broken — a link to an external domain that is down or no longer exists
- Timed out — the target URL did not respond within the configured threshold
The output is a structured report showing the full link inventory sorted by status. Broken links are highlighted with the page they appear on and the anchor text that references them.
For SEO, broken links are a direct ranking signal. For users, they are a trust signal. The Domain Suite makes it trivial to identify and fix them before they accumulate.
External Domain Discovery
Every external link on a crawled domain is captured and attributed. The Domain Suite builds a map of:
- Which external domains this site links to, and how often
- Which external domains appear in the most prominent positions (navigation, content, footer)
- New external domains that appeared since the last crawl (in diff mode)
- External domains that have been removed since the last crawl
This external relationship map is useful for:
- Partnership intelligence — see which organisations a company publicly endorses by linking to them
- Technology stack detection — external links often reveal the tools and services a company uses
- Competitive relationship mapping — which competitors, industry bodies, or media sources a company references
- Backlink strategy research — which domains in your space link to each other, revealing link-building relationships
The Spectre Hopper
Discovered external domains are automatically added to the Spectre Hopper — a queue of domains waiting for further investigation.
The Hopper acts as a research queue: instead of deciding your next crawl target manually, the platform surfaces domains that are already relevant based on their relationship to your current targets. You review the Hopper, select which domains to investigate next, and the extraction infrastructure picks up from there.
This transforms Spectre from a point-in-time extraction tool into a continuous graph-expansion intelligence system. Each crawl surfaces the next layer of the web graph relevant to your research.
Outreach Discovery
The Domain Suite includes an outreach discovery layer that identifies contact signals from crawled domains:
- Contact page structures and the fields they expose
- Email patterns inferred from visible addresses (useful for lead enrichment)
- LinkedIn, Twitter/X, and other social profile references
- Press contact and PR-specific pages
- Named individuals with visible roles
This information feeds directly into Spectre Email — giving the outreach pipeline context-rich target data derived from the actual content of the target domain, not from a purchased lead list.
Running a Domain Suite Analysis
From the Spectre dashboard:
- Enter the target domain
- Select Domain Suite as the crawl type
- Configure depth, page budget, and whether to enable diff mode
- Start the analysis
Results appear as the crawl progresses. The link health report populates in real time. The external domain map builds as pages are processed. The Hopper is updated with discovered external targets.
For large domains, the crawl can be scoped to a specific section — crawling only /blog/ or /products/ if you need domain intelligence for a subset of the site.
Practical Applications
SEO audit — run the Domain Suite on your own domain quarterly to catch broken links before they compound into ranking penalties.
Competitive domain mapping — run it on a competitor domain to understand who they link to, who their technology partners are, and what external resources they endorse.
Acquisition due diligence — before acquiring a domain or business with a significant web presence, understand the health and relationships of their digital footprint.
Content gap identification — compare your domain's external link profile to competitors' to see which authoritative sources they reference that you do not.
Agency site audits — run Domain Suite analyses for clients to identify link health issues as part of an SEO or content engagement.
The Domain Suite is a Pro-tier feature, included in all paid plans. A 31-day trial gives you full access to evaluate it on real targets before committing.