Astus: What Astus does, and what it does not

Astus is an assistant that lives inside your Joomla administration. It measures your site, tells you what is wrong, and can fix part of what it finds.

This page starts with the limits rather than the promises. That is the first thing anyone wants to know before buying, and it is what prevents the disappointment of day one.

What Astus does at no cost

Everything that measures is free and consumes no AI credit. You do not even need an AI key for any of it:

• The site audit. Four scores out of 100 (speed, accessible, reliability, Google), measured by Google PageSpeed Insights on your live pages.
• The audit of your Joomla configuration. Around twenty checks: search engine friendly URLs, compression, HTTPS, cache, robots.txt, AI crawlers, sitemap, llms.txt, 404 page. Many are fixed with one button.
• The sitemap, kept up to date on its own. One click on Fix next to "XML sitemap" creates the sitemap.xml file, with your public articles and menu items, each in its own language. From then on Astus rebuilds it by itself whenever an article, menu item or category is saved, and once a day. Pages set to noindex stay out. A sitemap written by another extension is never touched.
• The llms.txt file, kept up to date as well. It introduces your site to the AI assistants that read it: its name, its description, then its public pages and articles, by language. One click on Fix next to "llms.txt (AI assistants)" creates it. Astus then keeps it up to date like the sitemap. It has no effect on your ranking in Google, and its absence never counts as a fault. An llms.txt written by another extension is never touched. If your server displays its accented characters wrongly, Fix adds one line in an Astus block of .htaccess, then checks that the site still answers. If it does not, the line is removed at once.
• AI crawlers. Astus reads your robots.txt and tells you what it allows the AI assistant crawlers to do. Search crawlers read your pages to cite them in an answer: blocking them removes your site from those answers, and the line turns orange. Training crawlers collect text for future models: refusing them is a legitimate choice, with no effect on Google. Astus never changes these rules.
• Each language declares itself. On a multilingual site, Joomla tells Google about a page's other languages, never its own. Astus adds that missing link (hreflang), with no setting at all. On a single-language site, it adds nothing.
• SEO analysis of your articles, categories and menu items. Keyphrase, title, meta description, density, internal links, images without a description, transition words, tags. This is arithmetic, not AI.
• Your figures in Google, read from Search Console: impressions, clicks, average position, over 7 days, 28 days or a year.
• Broken link hunting through your articles, your modules, your menu items and your articles' custom fields.
• The list of images with no alternative text, article by article.

These measurements appear in three dashboard modules and in a component that gathers them on one full, printable page.

What Astus does with AI

The chat, inside the administration. It is the only part that consumes credit, and it never starts on its own. Astus can then:

• read and write your articles: create, rewrite, fix a title, a meta description, an image alternative text;
• apply the fixes the audit found, when they belong to the content;
• explain an audit finding in plain language, and say where it is fixed in Joomla;
• manage categories, tags and menu items;
• find a royalty-free image on Pexels and import it;
• describe the images in your media library, if Iris is installed: it looks at each image with no description and writes its alternative text in Iris.

Wherever the audit reports a problem, you get two buttons: one that fixes, one that asks Astus. You choose each time, and you remain free to do it all by hand, with a direct link to the article concerned.

What Astus does not do

It publishes nothing on its own. Articles it creates are unpublished by default. No destructive action (deleting, trashing, bulk unpublishing) runs without your confirmation.

It never sends a request until you press Send. The Fix and Ask Astus buttons scattered through the reports fill the chat input; they do not submit it. You pay for the tokens, so you decide.

It does not measure WCAG level AAA, and that is not a gap in the product: no automated tool can. It requires human review. Astus says so on screen rather than passing over it in silence.

An accessibility score is not compliance. An automated check covers roughly one third of the criteria. Astus issues no certificate, and its score is not a statement of conformance.

It does not work on a closed site. Google measures your site from its own servers: a local site, a staging site or one behind a password cannot be measured.

It does not travel back in time. Google Search Console only shows figures from the day you declared your property. It does not backfill: one more reason to do it early.

It does not change your pages' addresses. In Joomla, a page's address follows its alias: rewording a title for search engines can therefore move the page and break its links. Astus keeps the alias as it is. The title changes, the address stays, and no link breaks. If you explicitly ask for the address to change, Astus does it and sets a 301 redirect, which also saves links coming from other sites and your place in Google. It refuses when other pages would move along with this one: a menu item that has pages beneath it, or a category that holds articles or sub-categories. That is then done by hand, with the redirects.

It does not rewrite an already published title without your agreement. A title point in the analysis is a suggestion. Astus proposes the title in one sentence and waits for your answer.

It does not start the broken-link check on its own. It starts from the button of the "Astus - Site audit" module. If you ask for it in the chat, Astus points you to that button.

It replaces neither your judgement nor your writing. Astus proposes; what your site publishes remains what you decided to publish.

What you need

Joomla 6.2 or newer. No library, no companion extension.

Nothing at all to start. With no key whatsoever, the configuration audit and the SEO analysis of your content already work.

A PageSpeed key (free, no credit card) to measure your site comfortably.

A Search Console service account (free) to see your figures in Google.

An AI key (Gemini, Mistral or Claude), only if you want the chat. See What costs, what costs nothing.