Scoring and pain grades
How the category scores become one 0-100 composite, and why a lower score means a hotter lead.
A score per category, one weighted composite, one letter grade. The scale runs backwards from every other score you have seen, and that inversion is the product.
Lower is hotter
A composite of 100 describes a fast, secure, accessible, well-marked-up website. It is also a business with nothing wrong to sell against. A composite of 30 describes a business losing customers to problems you can fix this month and prove you fixed. The engine ranks your queue by pain, not by quality.
The categories
Category | Default weight | What feeds it |
|---|---|---|
Performance |
| Core Web Vitals, lab performance, TTFB, page weight |
Security |
| TLS grade, security headers, known CVEs, exposed surface, email authentication |
SEO |
| Indexability, metadata, structured data, rich results, keyword rankings |
Google Business Profile |
| Hours, categories, photos, open or closed, map visibility, website agreement |
Reputation |
| Review volume, rating, recency, owner responses |
Turning visits into calls |
| Calls to action, contact paths, forms, trust signals |
Accessibility |
| WCAG failures found on the rendered page |
Technology |
| Framework currency, CMS health, dependency risk |
AI visibility |
| AI-crawler access, answerable content, entity definition |
AI trust |
| Authorship, freshness, citations, extractable structure |
Content quality |
| Substance, freshness, placeholder content |
For a business with no website, Google Business Profile is the only category with a score.
Reviews and the map
Two of these categories read evidence you gather after the audit, and the score is taken again when it arrives.
Reviews. Once reviews are fetched, Reputation also counts how often the owner replies and how long it has been since the last review. An owner who answers fewer than half of them loses points, and fewer than a fifth loses more; a listing with no review in three months loses points, and in six months more. How recent the reviews are is only scored when every review on the listing was read, so a busy listing is never called quiet on the strength of a sample.
The map. Once a Local Grid has finished, the Google Business Profile grade also counts where the business appears. Missing from more than half of the grid's points costs points, and from more than three quarters costs more; making the top three at fewer than a fifth of them costs a little more. A grid that stopped part way, or one run on sample data, is not counted.
The Google Business Profile grade also compares the website with the listing when the audit runs. A name, phone number or address that differs costs points, and one the listing has and the website leaves out costs fewer. Formatting is not a difference: spacing, abbreviations, a business name in front of the address and the country written out or as a code all read as the same thing.
Grades
Grade | Composite | Read as |
|---|---|---|
A |
| Healthy; little to sell |
B |
| Healthy; little to sell |
C |
| Worth a look; a single strong angle may exist |
D |
| Hot lead; significant, provable problems |
F |
| Hot lead; significant, provable problems |
Missing signals score neutral
If a category has no usable measurement, because the accessibility scanner was not installed, say, it is scored neutral rather than zero. Scoring an unmeasured category as a failure would manufacture pain that is not there, and the first prospect to notice would be right to dismiss the whole report.
Weighting for what you actually sell
The same city should not rank identically for a security consultancy and an SEO shop. Scoring profiles re-weight the categories around what you fix, and the profile that produced a score is stored with it so an old score is never silently reinterpreted under new weights.
default: Balanced (all services)seo_agency: SEO / content agencyweb_design: Web design / build agencysecurity: Security / IT servicesreputation: Reputation / local SEO
From score to pitch
Scoring also ranks the angles: the findings that are severe, provable and worth acting on. That ranked list is what the report's action plan opens with, so the number and the document always tell one consistent story.