What it does
Every audit produces one graded report: an overall score out of 100 with a letter grade, four discipline scores, eight category scores, and a prioritised list of what to fix.
Reading the results
The overall grade
| Score | Grade | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| 97-100 | A+ | Excellent. Only minor refinements remain. |
| 90-96 | A | Excellent. Only minor refinements remain. |
| 80-89 | B | Good. A handful of priorities to address. |
| 70-79 | C | Fair. Several issues are holding the site back. |
| 60-69 | D | Needs work. Significant issues to fix. |
| 0-59 | F | Critical. Major issues are blocking search performance. |
The overall score is one number and it is the least useful thing on the page. Use it to track movement between audits, not to decide what to do next.
The four disciplines
The audit scores eight technical categories, but they are rolled up into the four parts of SEO people actually work on:
| Discipline | Built from |
|---|---|
| On-page | Titles & Meta, Content, Links |
| Technical | Crawling & Indexing, Canonicalization, Security, Structured Data |
| AI | GEO / AI Search |
| Off-page | Nothing. See below. |
Four scores tell you where the work is. One 94/100 tells you nothing.
Discipline scores are weighted by how many checks each category carries, so a category with four checks moves the discipline more than one carrying a single check. A plain average would let a one-check category swing the number as hard as everything else combined.
Off-page shows as not measured, and that is deliberate. Nothing in the audit measures backlinks today, because that requires a paid backlink data subscription that is not enabled. Rather than invent a score or quietly drop the discipline, the report says it is not measured. If a tool shows you an off-page score without a backlink data source behind it, it is guessing.
Per-check scoring
Each check scores in proportion to how much of the site it affects. One page missing a canonical tag out of fifty does not score the same as fifty pages missing one, and fixing 49 of 50 problems moves the number. Earlier versions scored each check pass-or-fail, which meant a single affected URL collapsed a category to zero and fixing almost everything changed nothing.
The fix list
Recommendations are ordered by expected impact. Each one names the category, the issue, the fix, and the affected URL where there is a specific one.
Where to start
- Look at the four discipline scores, not the overall grade.
- Take the lowest one that is measured.
- Work its recommendations top down.
- Re-run the audit and compare. The report diffs against your previous audit of the same site, so you can see what actually moved.
Limits and cost
- An audit crawls up to 200 pages. Larger sites are sampled.
- Each audit consumes a usage credit.
- The report is saved, so re-opening or sharing it later costs nothing.
When it goes wrong
Scores that swing hard between two runs. Check whether the number of crawled pages changed. Auditing 12 pages then 180 pages is not a comparison.
A category shows a dash instead of a score. Nothing measurable was found for it on the pages crawled. That is not a zero and is not counted against you.