Website Audit Scores Explained
Where each number on your audit comes from: the eight results tabs, the AI recommendations block, and the exact scoring formulas behind them.
Understanding Your Results
Audit results are organized into 8 tabs. Each tab populates progressively as its analyzers complete — skeleton placeholders appear while data is loading.
Overview
Site metadata (title, description, Open Graph tags, favicon), hosting information (server, CDN detection), and the detected technology stack grouped by category.
PageSpeed
Four Lighthouse scores (Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices, SEO), Core Web Vitals (FCP, LCP, TBT, CLS, Speed Index), top optimization opportunities, diagnostics, and a final screenshot of the rendered page.
Accessibility
Two-lens view: User Experience score from Google PageSpeed and a Code Structure analysis covering ARIA usage, semantic HTML, heading hierarchy, form labels, image alt text, color contrast, keyboard navigation, and WCAG level determination. Issues are categorized by severity: Critical, Serious, Moderate, and Minor.
SEO
Composite SEO score (0-100) broken into 8 weighted components: Basic Metadata (20 pts), Link Health (15 pts), Canonical Tags (15 pts), Metadata Consistency (15 pts), Redirect Management (10 pts), Crawling & Indexing (10 pts), Social Media Tags (10 pts), and Schema Markup (5 pts). Each component is expandable with specific recommendations.
AI Readiness
GEO/AEO score measuring how well your site is optimized for AI citation. Checks structured data (JSON-LD, FAQ/HowTo schema), heading hierarchy, question-answer patterns, reading level, word count, and robots.txt access for 14 AI crawlers — search indexers (OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot), assistant fetchers (ChatGPT-User, Claude-User), and training crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot); only the first two categories affect the score.
Security
Score gauge based on 7 security headers: Content-Security-Policy, Strict-Transport-Security, X-Frame-Options, X-Content-Type-Options, Referrer-Policy, Permissions-Policy, and X-XSS-Protection. Each header shows its status, risk level, and a recommendation if missing or misconfigured.
CSS
CSS quality score with file metrics (count, total size, minification status), complexity analysis (specificity, nesting depth, !important usage), issues by severity, detected frameworks (Bootstrap, Tailwind, etc.), and design token extraction (colors, fonts, spacing, breakpoints).
Hosting
Full SSL certificate details including issuer, validity dates, days remaining (color-coded: red if under 30 days, yellow under 90, green otherwise), DNS records table (A, AAAA, MX, TXT, NS, CNAME, SOA), and server information.
AI Recommendations
Above the results tabs, an AI Recommendations card summarizes the audit in plain English and lists up to 15 prioritized recommendations. Each one shows a severity level, a suggested fix, and a link to the results tab it came from. The recommendations are generated by an AI model from your audit's findings and are constrained to reference only what the audit actually detected — they don't introduce outside data. If a summary can't be generated for a particular audit, the rest of your results are unaffected. Because the recommendations are AI-generated, review them before acting on them or including them in client deliverables. Available on all plans; the block is also included in PDF reports and, on the Agency plan, JSON exports.
Scores & Methodology
Overall Score
The overall score is the average of four Google PageSpeed Insights scores: (Performance + Accessibility + Best Practices + SEO) / 4. This requires the PageSpeed phase to complete. If PageSpeed fails or times out, the overall score is not available.
Color Thresholds
All scores follow the Google PageSpeed Insights color convention:
Composite SEO Score (100 Points)
The SEO tab displays a composite score built from 8 weighted components. Each component draws from one or more analyzer results.
| Component | Max Points | How It's Calculated |
|---|---|---|
| Basic Metadata | 20 | Title presence and length (optimal 50-60 chars), meta description presence and length (optimal 150-160 chars) |
| Link Health | 15 | Scaled from broken links analyzer score (score x 15/100) |
| Canonical Tags | 15 | Scaled from canonical tags analyzer score (score x 15/100) |
| Metadata Consistency | 15 | Scaled from metadata consistency analyzer score (score x 15/100) |
| Redirect Management | 10 | Scaled from redirect check analyzer score (score x 10/100) |
| Crawling & Indexing | 10 | Sitemap presence (-5 if missing, -1 to -3 per issue), robots.txt presence (-2 if missing, -1 to -3 per error) |
| Social Media Tags | 10 | OG Title (-3), OG Description (-3), OG Image (-2), OG URL/Type (-2 if both missing) |
| Schema Markup | 5 | 0 if no JSON-LD detected, 5 if present |
Individual Analyzer Scores
Each analyzer produces its own 0-100 score with specific deduction rules. The analyzer reference gives the exact formula for every one of them.
Next Steps
- Reports & exports — hand these results to a client as a white-label PDF, or export them as JSON.
- How to run a website audit — the scan phases behind these numbers, and what to do when one stalls.
- Help & FAQ — why a score can be missing, and what partial results mean.