Real-reader feedback form: canonical web-quality reference brief

You are reading this because someone asked you to cold-read a research brief and tell them whether it lands. The brief is at the link they sent you. This form is the response. Fill it in, send it back. Six questions. Estimated 15 minutes after the brief read (the brief itself is the longer part: 30-45 minutes).

The author will not push back on your answers. The answers feed a one-line decision: dispatch the research run, revise the brief to v3, or kill it. Your job is to read the brief cold and answer honestly. The author's job is to act on what you said.

You can paste this form into a gist, a Google Doc, or directly into the thread you got the DM in. The structure matters more than the format.

Q1. Does the brief's Q1 recipient match you?

Why we ask: The brief names a specific recipient class: "the senior web developer who holds their public-facing work to the highest standard available in 2026, and who personally owns the one domain in question." The brief was scoped after a synthetic stranger test bounced on the agency framing. The author needs to know whether the scoped framing now matches a real person, namely you.

The question: Does the brief's Q1 recipient match you?

If partial, what does the brief get right and what does it get wrong about you? Specifically: does the "personally owns the one domain in question" framing fit your situation, or do you operate at a different scale (multiple domains, a team domain, an employer's domain)?

Your answer:

Q2. Do the brief's Q2 before-state items name gaps you actually have?

Why we ask: The brief lists nine specific knowledge gaps the recipient is meant to have (Agentic Browsing category, HSTS preload mechanics, sitemap engine semantics, CSP hash discipline, AVIF encoder flags, robots.txt AI-crawler posture, soft-404 mitigation, JSON-LD beyond WebSite/Article, Cool URI commitments). The brief says the senior developer "knows X exists but does not know Y about it." The author needs to know whether you, a real senior developer, actually have these gaps, or whether the brief is fictional about its recipient.

The question: For each of the nine items below, mark KNOW (I have this and could write the canonical reference on it myself), DON'T KNOW (this is a real gap for me), or DON'T CARE (this gap exists but is not load-bearing for my work).

Anything missing from this list that you would expect a 2026 canonical reference to cover?

Your answer:

Q3. Would you read the deliverable the brief proposes?

Why we ask: The brief estimates a 10,000-20,000 word document with verification recipes per axis, a JSON register template, and a baseline-capture script. The brief says "this is not the document you skim; this is the document you read once and bookmark." The author needs to know whether you would actually read it, and at what altitude.

The question: Would you read it?

Follow-up: what answer to "depending on what" or "no" tells the author what to change?

Your answer:

Q4. What would make you bounce?

Why we ask: The brief's worst failure mode is producing a beautifully-shaped artifact you would close at paragraph three. The author needs to know which framings cost the most readers before the deliverable is written, not after.

The question: Reading the brief, what made you start to bounce? Examples of what counts: a specific phrase, a framing, a scope choice, an axis the brief over-weights, an axis it under-weights, the length estimate, the tone, the "anti-LLM-tell discipline" section, the named-author-blog allow-list. Be blunt; bluntness is the point.

Your answer:

Q5. What is the brief's strongest claim?

Why we ask: The author has an intuition about which idea in the brief is load-bearing. The author may be wrong. The author needs to know which idea actually carries the brief for a real reader so that idea is preserved in v3 if a revision happens, and so the deliverable foregrounds it if the brief gets dispatched as written.

The question: What is the brief's strongest claim, in your reading? The one that, if removed, would collapse the brief. Open-ended; one paragraph is fine.

Your answer:

Q6. How long did this take you?

Why we ask: Calibration. The brief estimates 30-45 minutes for the read plus 15 minutes for the form. If readers consistently report longer or shorter, the author knows the brief's altitude estimate is off and adjusts the next round.

The question: Brief read time + form fill time, in minutes.

Anything you want to add that the six questions did not capture?

Your answer:

Thank you. Send this back in the thread you got the DM in, or as a gist, or as a Google Doc link, or pasted as plain text in an email. Format does not matter; the content does.