For example, SiteProfile's spider can test, process and record the speed of every link on a Web site. It is capable of processing up to 3,00,000 links in 24 hours. This gives you a good overall comparison with your competitors, and a good indication of how your users experience your site. So far so straightforward. For the less straightforward tests of freshness and accessibility more subjective criteria are used.
Freshness is measured by looking at the 'last modified' date stamp on pages.
Accessibility is measured by testing how long it takes to navigate to particular pages from a specified page, and how much of the site can be navigated in less than five minutes. Only the shortest path to each page is measured which means real life accessibility is likely to be longer. Again home and office user classifications are listed. WebCriteria has also released 20 of its industry benchmarks, which make interesting reading. The fastest is SAS at three and eight seconds respectively.