Ferguson

I launched Ferguson last week and gained around 50 new users.

After a week or so, I wanted to know what people thought of Ferguson and how they found its responses when auditing their own landing pages... so I decided to send out a quick email to ask.

I never really expect to hear anything back but I got a response that made my day, I summarized the whole email as a testimonial with the author's permission, here's their feedback:

"Ferguson's findings actually differ from what you get from a regular AI. I tried Claude against my website first and Ferguson was better. I'm a Java developer, not an SEO specialist, so the report was priceless for me. There are a lot of solo devs who are experts in their field but absolute beginners at conversion and SEO. Those people need something like Ferguson."

That response really helped validate what I'd been thinking throughout the development of Ferguson. The thing is, I know the site is better than just using a regular LLM but until I'd actually released it into the wild I had no idea if other people would realize it too.

That one email helped to validate the whole idea.

Ferguson finally launched this week and there's been a flurry of new activity on the site. New users are signing up daily to check how their landing page stacks up.

The stand-out feature of Ferguson is that every audit is feeding a growing benchmark. A dataset that will hopefully give anyone building a landing page the power to see where their competitors fail and common gaps within categories.

With all the new signups I thought it would be a good idea to produce a report based on all the audits performed so far.

So here's a quick overview of Ferguson's first benchmark report:
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Number of audits:
176

Most audited category:
SaaS

Most common score band:
Room to improve

Most common issue:
Objection Coverage
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As this is IndieHackers, here's the low-down on the SaaS data:

SaaS pages averaged Converting well, which is the strongest result in this sample. But Converting well does not mean problem-free. Several patterns appeared consistently enough to be worth paying attention to.

The most common issue, appearing in 69% of the 71 SaaS pages reviewed for this check, was a failure to address the top visitor objections. Most visitors arrive with doubts: Is this too complicated? Will it work for my situation? What happens if I want to cancel? Pages that do not surface and answer those questions leave visitors to resolve their own hesitation, which most will not bother to do. Fixing this does not require a dedicated FAQ section. It can be as simple as a line of copy near the CTA that pre-empts the most obvious concern.

Vague claims were the second most common issue, flagged on 56% of the 71 SaaS pages assessed. This is one of the most persistent problems in SaaS copywriting. Phrases like 'saves you time', 'easy to use', or 'powerful features' appear on nearly every competitor's page, which means they do nothing to differentiate and nothing to persuade. A page that says '4 hours saved per week, based on data from 1,200 users' gives a visitor something concrete to evaluate. Vague language gives them nothing to hold onto.

Post-CTA clarity was a problem on 56% of the 71 SaaS pages in this check. This one is underappreciated. Visitors do not just wonder whether to click a CTA. They wonder what clicking it will actually involve. Will they be asked for a credit card? Will someone call them? Will they land in a product immediately? When the page does not answer that question, hesitation increases. A short line beneath the button, something like 'No credit card required. You are in the product in 60 seconds', can meaningfully reduce that friction.

Nearly half of SaaS pages in this sample also had issues with CTA focus. Specifically, 46% of the 71 pages assessed were flagged for not establishing one dominant primary CTA. When a page offers multiple equally weighted actions, visitors face a small but real decision about which path to take. That friction tends to reduce the likelihood of taking any action at all. And 44% of the 71 pages assessed had headlines that did not clearly differentiate from competitors, meaning a visitor could swap the logo for a rival's and the headline would still make sense.

Overall some quite interesting findings! Obviously the dataset is still small but it's growing every day.

My current aim is to produce a report every quarter depending on the numbers, I might be able to push this to monthly but quarterly seems like a good fit for now.

If you're interested in reading the full report, check it out at:
https://useferguson.com/blog/ferguson-benchmark-report-q2-2026