What we score

Technical SEO

The plumbing. Whether a search engine can reach your pages, read them, and decide they belong in its index at all.

Everything else is wasted if this is wrong. A page nobody can reach cannot be found however well it is written, and problems here tend to be invisible from your own browser: your site looks fine to you while a crawler is being turned away.

Page Speed

How quickly your page can start showing something. Not a stopwatch reading, but the things in what your server sends that decide whether it can be fast at all.

People leave. A page that takes a few seconds to show anything loses a large share of the people who asked for it before they have seen a word, and they are gone before they know what you sell. Search engines measure this directly and use it to choose between two pages that are otherwise equal.

What this cannot tell you. We never run your JavaScript, so we cannot time your page or report Core Web Vitals. What we can do is name the causes, which is the part you can actually change.

On-Page SEO

What each page says about itself: its title, the one-line summary under it in search results, its headings, and the words a screen reader or a crawler finds when it arrives.

This is what someone reads in a list of ten results before deciding which to click. A page can rank perfectly well and still be skipped because its title was cut off mid-sentence or its summary was a paragraph the search engine picked at random.

Generative Engine Optimization

Generative Engine Optimization: whether an AI writing an answer has anything of yours it can actually use.

People increasingly ask an assistant instead of scrolling a results page. An assistant that cannot find a clear, quotable statement of what you do and who you are will describe a competitor who published one.

AI Overviews

AI Overviews: the answer box that now sits above the ordinary search results.

That box takes the clicks that used to go to the first result. Appearing inside it is worth more than ranking below it, and what gets pulled into it is usually a direct answer to a question, clearly marked.

Answer Engine Optimization

Answer Engine Optimization: whether your pages answer real questions directly enough to be quoted as the answer.

Being quoted requires a passage that stands on its own. A page that explains everything beautifully across four paragraphs is harder to quote than one that asks the question as a heading and answers it in the sentence underneath.

LLM Optimization

LLM Optimization: whether assistants are allowed to read you at all, and find something worth reading.

This is the one segment where a single line in a file can switch you off entirely. A robots file that blocks the crawlers assistants use means nothing on your site can ever be quoted in an AI answer, whatever else you do.

What this cannot tell you. Blocking assistants is sometimes a deliberate choice about your own copyright. We say what it costs rather than calling it a mistake.

E-E-A-T

Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust: the signals that say a real business with real people stands behind this site.

Search engines weigh these heavily for anything touching money or health, and so do readers. Most of it is ordinary: say who you are, let people contact you, publish your terms, show that customers exist.

What this cannot tell you. This scores the trust signals your pages carry. Whether readers and search engines actually find you authoritative is decided off your site, and we do not measure it.

Local SEO

Being found by somebody near you who could walk in, ring up, or book. The searches that end in “near me”, and the map results above the ordinary ones.

For a shop, a clinic, a restaurant or anyone who serves a town rather than the internet, this is most of the business. Somebody two streets away searching for what you sell either finds you with your hours and your address, or finds a competitor who published theirs.

What this cannot tell you. This scores what your own pages say. Your Google Business Profile, your map listing, and what customers say about you elsewhere are decided off your site and we do not see them.

Programmatic SEO

Programmatic SEO: sections built from a template, one page per topic, so a single piece of work covers hundreds of searches instead of one.

It is how a small site competes on the long tail of very specific searches. It is also easy to do badly, and a hundred near-identical thin pages is worse than not having them.

What this cannot tell you. Whether a templated section is worth building for your market is a judgement about your business, not something a page can prove. This scores only whether one exists.

Off-Page SEO

What your own pages say about your presence everywhere else: your profiles, your press, your reviews.

Search engines and assistants try to work out whether a real business stands behind a site. Claiming your own profiles is the part of that you control directly, and it costs nothing.

What this cannot tell you. We cannot see who links to you. Nothing in the response your site sends reveals that, so this scores the presence you declare, not the reputation you have.