About Docket
Docket is built by Matt Kerr, one person, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and sold by his company, Kerr & Company LLC. It is an app for Mac and 64-bit Windows that audits a site's SEO, copy and branding against 99 checks across 13 lanes, runs the crawl on your own machine, and costs $59 once, and activation is a licence key you paste in once.
There is no team page because there is no team, and no support desk because there is one person reading support@docketseo.app and the issue tracker. Saying so is more useful than a stock photo.
Why it exists
Every SEO tool worth using is a subscription to somebody's crawler farm. You paste in a domain, a queue somewhere fetches it, and you pay monthly for the privilege of being told what your own HTML says. The crawl is the cheap part. The recurring bill is for the servers, and the servers exist because the tool was built as a service rather than as software.
Docket is the other shape. The audit engine is Python, frozen into the app, and it runs on your own computer. The crawler and the checks are written on Python's own standard library, with one outside package for the list of trusted certificates; the app's window talks to the engine through a small web server on your computer, which brings its own few packages. There is no account, no crawl credit, no per-seat price and no queue. Audit the same site forty times in an afternoon; nobody is counting, because there is nobody to count.
What that changes about the findings
Running locally is not only a pricing decision. A crawler farm sees your site as an
anonymous datacentre IP; your computer sees it the way a person does. It also asks your homepage
once as each of the crawlers that matter, with Docket's name added to every request
(the list). That is how Docket can tell you what your CDN returns to
GPTBot specifically, rather than what your robots.txt claims it should.
It is also why the awkward findings are possible. Docket will tell you your AI opt-out is unenforceable, that your directive names a crawler that has been retired, or that the markup Google needs sits past the 2MB it will actually read. We publish those measurements as datasets rather than as marketing: 6236 sites' robots.txt files in the directives survey, 85 homepages in the entity survey, 82 in the page-weight survey. The raw JSON for each is in the site's repository, next to the scripts that check every figure on this site is derived from it rather than typed into a sentence.
What Docket is not good at
The honest list, because you will find it out in the first hour anyway:
- The desktop app is for Mac and 64-bit Windows, and nothing else. Apple silicon or Intel,
macOS 12 or later, or a 64-bit Windows PC, with an installer signed by Kerr & Company LLC. There is no
web version. The same engine ships as a Linux x86_64 command line build,
without the desktop app and without
--render. This page said there was no Windows build, and that none was planned while it is one person, until Docket v1.3.155; it denied the Linux build entirely until 2026-08-10, when the download page had been describing it for weeks. - It is not a rank tracker. No keyword positions, no search volume, no backlink index. Ahrefs and Semrush have spent years and a great deal of money building those, and Docket has no answer to them.
- It is not built for enormous sites. Screaming Frog will crawl 400,000 URLs and let you sort them; Docket is built to read a site closely, not to survey one at that scale.
- The app's source is not public. The website and its datasets are; the application is not. If your policy requires reading the code, Docket will not pass it.
- It is version v1.3.155. There are things it should connect to and does not yet: Search Console for your own impressions is the biggest.
How you can check any of this
The Mac download is signed with an Apple Developer ID and notarised, which means the certificate carries a legal name and Apple has checked it. You do not have to take that on faith. After downloading the 22.1 MB disk image:
codesign -dv --verbose=4 "/Volumes/Docket 1.3.155/Docket.app"
spctl -a -t open --context context:primary-signature -v Docket-1.3.155-arm64.dmgThe first prints the authority chain, ending at Apple's root. The second should say
accepted and source=Notarized Developer ID. Any Mac app worth
installing will survive both; a surprising number will not.
On Windows, the installer is signed by Kerr & Company LLC. Right-click it, choose Properties, and the Digital Signatures tab names the signer; in PowerShell, Get-AuthenticodeSignature followed by the file name should report Valid.
What to do if a finding is wrong
Tell us, with the URL. Docket has shipped false positives. The byte-cap check once reported a major news site's title tag as past Googlebot's cutoff, when what it had found was an inline SVG icon label reading "Close icon" and the real title was fine. That is written up in full on the page about the check, because a tool that hides its mistakes is asking you to trust its output more than its authors do. The fixes that have shipped, with the release and the day, are on the page of corrections.
Who else is behind it
Kerr & Company also makes Outlier, Crisp Video, AdPlaybook and Bookbreaker. They are separate products with their own sites, and none of them shares code or data with Docket.
Writing or making videos about Docket?
Kerr & Company, the company that sells Docket, runs an affiliate programme that pays a commission on each sale, using a personal code the buyer enters at checkout instead of a tracking link. The rates, the payout terms and the disclosure you owe your readers are on the affiliates page.
Common questions
Who makes Docket?
Matt Kerr, one person, in Grand Rapids, Michigan; the seller is his company, Kerr & Company LLC. There is no team. The macOS download is signed with an Apple Developer ID and notarised, so the legal name on the certificate can be checked with codesign before you install anything.
Does Docket send my site data anywhere?
The audit and its results stay on your computer, in ~/.docket/ as plain JSON. Five optional checks, on by default, do reach out: Docket asks your own server what it tells AI crawlers, refreshes its crawler knowledge file from docketseo.app (which learns nothing about what you audit), checks whether the email addresses your site publishes can receive mail, sends Google PageSpeed Insights the address you are measuring (no API key needed), and asks Google's public autocomplete for topic suggestions. --offline, or "Keep it private" in the app, turns all of them off and the audit still completes.
What can Docket not do?
It runs on Macs (Apple silicon or Intel) and 64-bit Windows, with no web version; it does not track keyword rankings or backlinks, and it is not built for crawling hundreds of thousands of URLs. The application source is not public, though the website's datasets are.