Every number on your scorecard states its denominator.
A score is a claim about what was actually measured. This page explains exactly what that claim covers, and what it deliberately does not.
The rubric
129 checks across eight weighted categories. Each category contributes to the overall score in the proportion below, so a site that is technically flawless but thin on content cannot score its way to a clean bill of health on infrastructure alone.
| Category | Checks | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| Technical foundation & indexability | 20 | 15% |
| Crawling, rendering & site structure | 16 | 10% |
| Search appearance | 18 | 10% |
| Content quality & helpfulness | 18 | 20% |
| E-E-A-T & trust signals | 15 | 15% |
| Site content health & cannibalization | 14 | 10% |
| AI / answer-engine readiness (GEO) | 16 | 12% |
| Page experience & performance | 12 | 8% |
| Total | 129 | 100% |
Three outcomes, not two
Every check on every page resolves to one of three states, and the third one is the point of this page.
- Pass: the rule ran against the page and the page satisfied it.
- Fail: the rule ran and the page did not satisfy it. It enters the fix queue.
- Unmeasured: the rule could not run. The crawler could not reach the page, the resource timed out, a third-party API was unavailable, or the check requires data this site does not expose.
Unmeasured is not a pass. It is not rounded up, it is not quietly dropped from the denominator, and it does not silently improve your score. It appears as its own state in every view, and the coverage figure tells you how much of the rubric actually ran.
This matters more than it sounds. The default in this category is to treat what could not be checked as fine, which is how tools report 95/100 for sites with real problems: they scored the third of the site they reached and presented it as the whole.
What coverage means
Coverage is the share of applicable checks that produced a verdict, pass or fail, rather than an unmeasured. It is reported per page, per category and for the site as a whole.
A score of 71 at 86% coverage means something precise: of the checks that ran, 71% passed, and 14% of the rubric never ran at all. Both halves of that sentence are on the scorecard. A high score at low coverage is a weaker result than a lower score at full coverage, and the interface says so rather than leaving you to work it out.
How each check is decided
Every check declares its own method, because "our AI found an issue" is not a finding:
- Deterministic rule: a fact about the page. Present or absent, no judgement involved.
- Graph analysis: computed across your site's structure, such as internal link reachability.
- Third-party API: measured by an external source. Unavailable upstream means unmeasured, not pass.
- Model judgement: assessed by a language model, and labelled as such wherever it appears.
Each check also declares who can fix it:
- Auto: the engine produces a verified change.
- Assist: the engine drafts a change and a person decides.
- Human: only a person can decide. The engine will not pretend otherwise.
The free scan is a slice, and says so
The public scorecard crawls a capped number of pages. It reports how many it covered against how many it found to exist, so the number you get is explicitly a claim about that slice. It is advisory: it inspects public HTML and does not verify changes against a build.
If the scanner is unavailable, the scan fails and says so. There is no path in which a grade is produced without a crawl behind it.