What your SEO score means, and what it can't tell you
·4 min read
An SEO score is a number an audit tool calculates from the problems it found on your pages. Google does not give your site an SEO score, and no tool can read Google's ranking systems, so the number only measures how many of that tool's checks you pass and how badly you fail the rest. Use it to track your own site over time. Don't use it to compare tools, and don't read it as a ranking forecast.
That sounds dismissive. It isn't. A score that drops from 82 to 61 after a deploy is one of the fastest ways to learn you shipped a noindex tag to production.
Does Google have an SEO score?
No. Google publishes no per-site score. Its guide to optimizing for generative AI search says no third-party tool has access to Google's ranking or AI systems. Any "Google SEO score" you see is a vendor's estimate.
The one Google-made number with SEO in its name is the Lighthouse SEO category in Chrome DevTools and PageSpeed Insights. It runs a short list of pass or fail audits, such as a valid status code, a meta description, crawlable links and a valid canonical. Chrome's Lighthouse SEO docs list every audit. A 100 there means you cleared the basics on one page. Plenty of pages score 100 and rank nowhere.
Why your SEO score differs between tools
Every tool picks its own checks, severities and math. One tool may treat a missing H1 as serious. Another may ignore it. One crawls 500 pages, another looks at your home page. So the same site can score 92 in one tool and 58 in another on the same afternoon, and both numbers are honest.
That makes cross-tool comparison useless. Pick one tool, run it on the same pages after every meaningful change and watch the direction.
What a fair score should show you:
- The checks it ran.
- The fixes behind every lost point, ranked by priority.
- Which pages it looked at. A home-page score is not a site score.
- Checks that failed to run, kept separate from checks that passed.
If a tool hides any of these, treat its number as decoration.
How our SEO score is calculated
A score you can't audit is a score you can't act on, so here is our math. Our website check reports four numbers from 0 to 100: SEO readiness, AEO readiness, AI access and an overall score.
Each check starts at 100. Every fix it finds takes points off by priority.
| Fix priority | Points lost |
|---|---|
| High | 25 |
| Medium | 10 |
| Low | 2 |
A fix that affects several pages or items costs more, up to double. A medium fix on one page costs 10. The same fix on five or more pages costs 20.
Areas average their checks. SEO readiness is the mean of the scores from the checks in that area. The overall score is the mean of the three area scores. A check that returned no result is left out instead of counted as a pass or a zero.
An open high-priority fix caps the score at 89. We use the same bands as PageSpeed Insights: 90 and above is good, 50 to 89 needs work, below 50 is poor. A site with a blocked robots.txt or a noindexed home page should never land in the green, however clean the rest is.
Here is an illustrative example. Your on-page check finds one high fix and one medium fix on one page, so it scores 100 minus 25 minus 10, or 65. Your structured data check finds two low fixes and scores 96. Add two more checks that come back clean at 100 and the mean of all four is 90. The open high fix holds it at 89, out of the green, until you fix it.
Sampled AI answers never feed these scores. We report them as shares, such as how many answers named your brand, because an AI response changing is not proof you fixed anything. Our post on checking your AI visibility covers that number.
What an SEO score can't tell you
A score measures readiness, not results. It can't tell you:
- Where you rank. Rankings depend on competition, links and intent, none of which a page check sees.
- How much traffic you get. Search Console clicks and impressions are the real measure. Our search performance guide shows where to find them.
- Whether your content is any good. A thin page with perfect tags scores well.
- What happened on pages it didn't check. Our check looks at the pages you pick, not every URL.
So a jump from 60 to 85 means you removed known blockers. It does not mean traffic will follow next week. If rankings are the problem, start with a full SEO audit and Search Console, and use the score to confirm the technical layer is clean.
Check your website's SEO score
Our website check runs on your URL plus up to two more pages on the same site. The default picks crawling and indexing, on-page SEO, structured data and content, which costs 67 credits for one page and 47 for each extra page. You see the price before it runs. It returns one fix list sorted by high, medium and low priority with the four scores above. It does not read Search Console or check rankings or backlinks.
Publish your fixes and run it again on the same URL. The new report compares itself with the last one and shows the percent of issues fixed, the score change and any new issues. If you want a quick look first, the home page preview needs no account and costs no credits.