How the simulation works

whyiq simulates 50 distinct visitors through your page. Each visitor is defined by a combination of psychological parameters that determine how they read, interpret, and react to your content.

Visitors are organised into 7 archetype categories: skeptics, researchers, impulse visitors, price-sensitive evaluators, technical experts, time-pressed decision makers, and accidental visitors. Within each category, individual visitors vary across multiple dimensions.

Visitor Parameters

• Patience threshold: how long before they disengage (measured in simulated scroll depth and reading time)
• Trust baseline: initial trust level (0-100) that determines how much social proof, authority signals, and specificity they need
• Cognitive load capacity: how much complexity they can process before switching to heuristic (System 1) decision-making
• Intent clarity: how specific their goal is when they arrive (browsing vs. evaluating vs. ready to buy)
• Price sensitivity: how quickly pricing information triggers evaluation anxiety
• Technical literacy: affects how they interpret jargon, feature lists, and technical claims

whyiq's V2 simulation engine is built on dual-process theory (Kahneman, 2011). Every visitor operates in one of two cognitive modes:

• System 1 (fast, intuitive): the visitor is scanning, not reading. They make snap judgments based on visual cues, headline clarity, and emotional resonance. Most visitors start here. If your page fails System 1 processing, they bounce before System 2 ever engages.
• System 2 (slow, analytical): the visitor is actively evaluating. They read feature lists, compare pricing, look for evidence. System 2 engagement is where conversion happens, but it requires System 1 to let them in first.

The simulation tracks when each visitor transitions between modes, and what triggers the switch. A page that loses visitors during System 1 processing has a clarity problem. A page that loses them during System 2 has a trust or value proposition problem.

Real visitors don't read your page in ideal conditions. whyiq applies 10 behavioral modifiers to simulate real-world conditions:

Modifiers are applied probabilistically based on visitor type and include temporal decay, so their influence diminishes as the visitor spends more time engaged with the page.

The V2 engine tracks 16 psychological triggers with empirical SAM (Self-Assessment Manikin) scale values. As each visitor moves through your page, the engine records affect events, moments where the visitor's emotional state shifts.

These events are aggregated into an emotional arc, a timeline of how the visitor's feelings evolved from landing to exit. The arc reveals patterns invisible to traditional analytics: trust building that collapses at the pricing section, excitement that turns to confusion at the feature list, or initial skepticism that never gets resolved.

The emotional arc is measured across three dimensions based on Russell's circumplex model of affect (Russell, 1980): valence (positive/negative), arousal (engaged/disengaged), and dominance (in-control/overwhelmed).

The clarity score is whyiq's primary metric. It measures how well your page communicates its core message across all 50 visitor types. The score is calculated from four weighted components:

• Correct understanding (40%): what percentage of visitors who correctly identified what your product does, who it's for, and why it matters
• Confusion severity (25%): the number and impact of specific confusion points identified across visitors
• Bounce probability (20%): the estimated percentage of visitors who would leave without taking any action
• Trust formation (15%): how many visitors developed enough trust to consider the call-to-action

A score of 70+ indicates your page communicates effectively to most visitor types. Below 50 means more than half your visitors are confused about at least one critical element of your proposition.

whyiq also evaluates how well your page performs in AI-generated search results. As large language models increasingly power search engines, traditional SEO alone is not enough. Our AI visibility methodology draws on research into Generative Engine Optimization (Aggarwal et al., KDD 2024), which demonstrated that structured content, authoritative citations, and clear factual claims significantly improve visibility in AI-generated responses.

The AI visibility score measures citation potential, structured data quality, factual density, and topical authority signals across your page content.

whyiq is built for founders and builders who want to know if their page works before they drive traffic to it. Traditional CRO requires thousands of visitors and weeks of data collection. whyiq gives you visitor-level reasoning in 60 seconds, whether you have traffic or not.

Every issue the simulation surfaces is tied to a specific page element, the visitor types it affects, and a concrete recommendation for what to change. You get a prioritized list of fixes, not a vague score.

The simulation complements real user testing. Use whyiq to find and fix the biggest clarity problems first, so when real visitors do arrive, they understand what you built.