How scoring works

The site score is one number between 0 and 100 for how completely your pages carry the SEO signals we check. It is worth knowing exactly what it is a score of, because that is where it is most often misread.

It scores audited pages, not your site

"Score across 270 audited pages" means 270 pages produced a result. Pages that were never crawled are not in the calculation at all — they are missing from the measurement, not scored as zero.

This is deliberate. A site half way through its first crawl would otherwise report a catastrophic score that says nothing about the site and everything about the crawl.

The same principle runs one level down: a check that could not be determined for a page is excluded from that check's denominator rather than counted against you.

The four pillars

Technical SEO, On-Page SEO, Discoverability and Rich Presence. Each is a group of individual checks.

The score is their weighted sum, not their average. Checks that matter more for search carry more weight, and the weights are renormalized over only the checks that actually had audited pages — so a site mid-crawl is not punished for data that has not arrived yet.

Why a deduction is the size it is

Each deduction weighs two things:

• Reach — how many pages the check affects.
• Weight — how much that check matters for SEO.

A missing meta description on 4 000 pages can therefore outrank a broken canonical on one. This surprises people, and it is the correct behaviour: the score is about the state of the site, not the severity of its worst single page.

A check that passes partially counts partially — a warning scores half of a pass, rather than nothing.

Critical, Warning, Opportunity — and points

These are two different rankings, shown side by side on purpose.

Severity says how serious the finding is in isolation. Points say how far fixing it moves the score. A Critical finding on three pages can be worth fewer points than an Opportunity on three thousand. Read both before deciding what to do first.

Why the score does not move when you edit

Every point on the score line is a crawl. The score is computed from the last crawl's data, so publishing a change does not move it — the next crawl does.

If your score looks stale, check when the site was last crawled before checking anything else.

When the model itself changes

If we change how scoring works — a check's verdict, a weight, what counts in a denominator — the trend comparison withholds the previous snapshot rather than subtracting two numbers measured with different rulers. You will see the trend badge go quiet for one cycle instead of reporting a drop that never happened.