One grade. Public. Verifiable.
Crash safety changed when one trusted grade — not a hundred spec sheets — told buyers which cars protect them. The web has no such grade for the sites people trust with their clicks, carts, and data. That's the gap oxvelo exists to fill.
The landscape: excellent tools, all facing inward
Web compliance tooling is genuinely good — and thoroughly fragmented. Accessibility scanners serve development teams. Privacy and consent platforms serve legal departments. Trust seals certify one framework at a time, mostly for enterprise buyers. Each speaks its own dialect of jargon to its own internal audience.
What none of them produce is the thing a visitor can use: a single plain-English grade, displayed on the site itself, that anyone can check in one click. Compliance stays invisible to the people it's meant to protect.
How the categories compare
| Accessibility scanners | Privacy & consent platforms | Trust seals & badges | oxvelo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Built for | Dev & compliance teams | Legal teams | Marketing pages | Owners and their visitors |
| Scope | Accessibility (WCAG) | Cookies, consent, policies | One framework at a time | Accessibility foundations, graded 0–100 — one score anyone can read |
| Output | Technical issue lists | Consent audit reports | Pass/fail seal | Plain-English score + metal tier (Platinum / Gold / Silver / Bronze) |
| Visible to visitors | Rarely | No | Seal, usually without a grade | Yes — the badge shows the tier |
| Verifiable by anyone | — | — | Sometimes, via vendor page | One click — cryptographically signed, plus a free public scanner to re-check any score |
| Methodology public | Varies | Varies | Rarely | Fully published & versioned (Rubric v1) with open data (CC BY 4.0) |
| Check any site free | Limited trials | No | No | Yes — 60 seconds, no signup |
| Pricing | Often quote-only | Typically quote-only | Typically quote-only | Published on the site — monitoring from $79/mo, no "contact sales" required |
| Monitoring | Enterprise plans | Scheduled scans | Dated seal refresh | Hourly watcher with drift alerts (oxvelo Shield, from $79/mo) |
Category descriptions reflect how these product families typically work and are sold; individual vendors vary. No vendor is named or graded here.
To be fair to the incumbents: point tools go deeper in their lane than a unified grade ever will — full-crawl accessibility suites, end-to-end consent management, audited SOC 2 attestations. oxvelo doesn't replace deep tooling for teams that need it. It does the thing none of them do: turn compliance into a public, checkable signal of trust.
Why you can trust the grade
A grade is only as good as its accountability. Ours is published end to end: an open, versioned scoring methodology, a public research report with seeds and raw data anyone can re-run, and a free scanner that lets you re-check any score we issue — including our own sites, which are graded on the same rubric. The badge itself is cryptographically signed; a forged one fails verification.