13 / Compare
Every audit gets an overall Site Health score and a score for each category from 0 to 100. The formula is strict on purpose: a site with critical problems cannot score in the high 90s.
A score should move when the site gets better or worse, and stay put when nothing important changed. SiteAuditLint scores by issue type and by the share of pages affected, so cosmetic opportunities barely move it while critical issues always do.
1. Penalties per issue type
| Severity | Fixed penalty | Plus share of pages affected |
|---|---|---|
| Critical | 8 points | 25 x share |
| Warning | 3 points | 12 x share |
| Opportunity | 0.5 point | 4 x share |
| Info | 0 | 0 |
Example: a warning on 10 percent of pages costs 3 + 12 x 0.1 = 4.2 points in its category.
2. Category weights
| Category | Weight |
|---|---|
| Technical SEO | 1.5 |
| On-Page SEO | 1.2 |
| Content | 1.0 |
| Internal Linking | 1.0 |
| Performance | 1.0 |
| Security | 1.0 |
| AEO / GEO | 0.8 |
| Accessibility | 0.7 |
| Images | 0.6 |
| Structured Data | 0.6 |
3. The critical issue penalty
The overall score is the weighted average of categories, minus 3 points per distinct critical issue type, up to 15 points. That is why a site with critical problems cannot score in the high 90s.
4. The dashboard around the score
- Site Health ring with the change since the last audit and a plain-language label.
- URL Health: crawled URLs split into Healthy, With issues, Redirects, Broken and Blocked.
- Category scores, issues by category and HTTP status codes.
- Answer Engine Readiness for AEO and GEO.
The number that matters most is the change since the last audit. Pair the score with audit comparison to see which URLs moved it.
Frequently asked questions
Why did one broken page cost so many points?
Every issue type costs a fixed amount just for being present. One critical issue costs about 8 points in its category, even on a 1,000 page site, so real problems are never averaged away.
Do tracking issues lower the SEO score?
No. Tracking & Analytics has its own score and never lowers the Site Health score.
Why is there no score on some audits?
When no page could be read, for example because every request failed, SiteAuditLint shows no score instead of a misleading one.
Want the background first? Browse the SiteAuditLint Academy, or see all features.