What changed, and why your score might have moved.
A score is only comparable to itself if the thing producing it holds still. When it doesn't, that has to be visible: otherwise last quarter's number and this quarter's are two different measurements wearing the same label.
Why a rubric needs a version
If a category gains three checks, every score in that category shifts, and none of your pages changed. A site owner comparing this month to last month would be reading a difference that came from us rather than from them.
So the rubric carries a version, it is shown in the footer of every page, and a scorecard records the version it was produced under. Two scores are only directly comparable when they share one.
What gets logged
| Change | Why it is logged |
|---|---|
| A check is added, removed or reweighted | Changes what a score means, so it changes the rubric version. |
| A check changes its method | A rule becoming a model judgement is a change in how much the result should be trusted. |
| A check changes its fix capability | Auto becoming Assist means a machine stopped being allowed to decide something. |
| An engine is added to citation tracking | Changes the denominator of citation share. |
| A crawler behaviour changes | Anyone who has allowed or blocked CrawldBot needs to know. |
Interface changes and bug fixes that do not move a number are not logged here. This is a record of things that change what a score means.
Notable changes
These are substantiated by the source. They are listed without dates because the source does not record them, and a date invented for a changelog is worse than no date at all.
The free scan stopped inventing grades
Public scorecard
The public scan endpoint previously wrote a finished result the moment it was called (status done, grade C+, score 72 from the demo seed, canned category rows, eight findings) and then returned "queued". Nothing was ever fetched, for any URL, and the fabricated result was publicly shareable. A scan now either runs on the real engine or reports honestly that scanning is unavailable. There is no remaining path that produces a grade without a crawl behind it.
This is the single change most relevant to anyone deciding whether to trust a number on this site.
The 129-check catalogue was restored
Rubric
The check catalogue was believed lost and had been regenerated with placeholder names. A surviving reference table turned out to hold the originals, and the catalogue was restored from it verbatim: real names, methods, severities and fix capabilities, with per-category counts of 20/16/18/18/15/14/16/12.
Those counts are what every category score on this site is a proportion of.
A dated public feed Not published yet
A running, dated changelog with an RSS feed is not published. The honest position is that the product does not currently maintain a public release history, and this page is the beginning of one rather than a backfill of one.
If you are integrating against the rubric and need to be told when it moves, that is exactly what the version in the footer and this page are for, and it is worth asking us directly until the feed exists.