From a URL to a plan

Every project starts on the 01 Product page, which asks What should Trawler use? You give it one address; Trawler reads that page and proposes who should try the product and what they want to get done.

The form

• Product URL — required. Paste the page a new user would open first: production, staging or a preview. If you leave out https://, it is added for you.
• Anything specific to test? — optional, up to 500 characters. Something like the new team-invite flow makes setup choose people and goals that exercise that area, starting from wherever a user would begin. The focus is shown on the plan page as Focus:; the people themselves are never told it.

Choose Analyze product. While it works the button reads Reading the product…, and a panel says Building your test plan. It takes about half a minute, then the plan page opens.

What setup reads

Setup fetches that one address, as the product’s server sends it:

• It follows up to five redirects and checks every hop the same way it checked the first.
• It reads at most 2 MB and waits at most 20 seconds.
• It does not run the page’s JavaScript and follows no links. A single-page app whose HTML is mostly empty gives setup little to go on — the proposal is then generic, and yours to rewrite.
• It announces itself as TrawlerSetup/1.0 (+https://usetrawler.com), so the request is easy to find in your logs.

The page’s text — up to 12,000 characters of it — goes to Trawler’s own setup model. Setup costs you nothing and does not use your model key. The text is handed to the model as data to describe, never as instructions to follow.

What it proposes

• A name and a description for the project, two sentences on what the product is and who it is for.
• Up to four people, each with a first name and a brief of two to four sentences. Setup asks for three or four.
• Up to six goals in order — outcomes a person wants on their first day, each something done in the product and visible in the browser. Setup asks for four to six. The first goal is getting in, signing up or signing in, only when the product has accounts.

It never proposes test accounts: those are yours to add. The name, description and focus cannot be changed after setup; the people and goals can, on the plan page.

Where the people may go

A run’s browser opens only the product’s own origin — https://app.example.com for https://app.example.com/start — plus the origin setup finally landed on, if the page redirected somewhere else. Everything else is blocked: links, redirects, scripts, styles, images, fonts, API calls and sign-in pages on other domains. The allowed origins cannot be changed in the app. If your product signs people in on another domain, the local runner lets you list it.

What it refuses

Message	Why
Paste the address of the product to test.	The field held only spaces. An empty field is stopped by the browser before it is sent.
That address is too long.	More than 2,048 characters, typed or reached by a redirect.
That address is on a private network. Trawler can only read public pages from here.	The address, or one it redirected to, resolves to a private, loopback, link-local or reserved address. This is checked on the address actually connected to, so a name that resolves differently later cannot get round it.
We could not find that address. Check the spelling.	The name does not resolve.
The page took too long to answer.	No complete answer within 20 seconds.
The page answered with an error (HTTP 404).	The page answered with an error status; the real status is shown.
The page redirected too many times.	More than five redirects.
Enter a web address such as https://app.example.com.	A redirect led to something that is not a plain http or https address, or to one with a username or password in it.
You have started many new projects recently. Try again in a few minutes.	A workspace can start 10 setups in 10 minutes and 100 in 24 hours. Failed attempts count too.
We could not build a plan for this page. Try again in a moment.	Anything else — an address that is not a web address at all, a username or password in the address, a server that refused the connection or whose certificate could not be verified (common on staging), or a setup model that could not propose people and goals from the page.

To test something only you can reach — localhost, a VPN, a private staging server — use the local runner, which reads and runs from your own machine.