How the Website Score works

01The principle: measured, or absent

Every input to the score is measured directly from your pages at the moment you run the check — the initial HTML, fetched the way search engines and AI crawlers fetch it. Nothing is estimated from industry averages, inferred from your sector, or invented to fill a gap. Where a check cannot run, it is excluded from the calculation entirely rather than scored as zero: a score never drops because data was unavailable.

02The seven components

Thirty-plus individual checks are grouped into seven components. Each check carries a weight based on its severity — how much it typically affects whether customers find, trust and choose a business: critical checks weigh 8, high 5, medium 3, low 1. A component's score is the weighted share of its checks that pass, from 0 to 100. Checks reported as "not detected" (softer signals, where absence proves less) count at half weight against the score.

The overall Website Score is the weighted mean of the component scores using the weights above. The weights reflect our judgement, formed across real audits, of how strongly each area affects commercial outcomes for UK local businesses — they are opinions held consistently, reviewed with each methodology version, and published here so you can disagree with them intelligently.

03Score bands

A low score demonstrates the deficiencies, not a counted number of lost customers.

04Confidence

Every report states its confidence. High means multiple pages were read with no fetch failures; medium means a single page was analysed; low means some pages could not be fetched, so treat the result as indicative. The report also states when it was measured — results are a snapshot, not a subscription.

05What the score deliberately does not claim

The Website Score measures your website. It cannot see your Google Maps rankings, your reviews, your citations across directories, or who links to you — each needs a different data source, and every report lists these exclusions explicitly. A full picture of local visibility combines all of them, which is what our paid audit work does. We would rather show you a smaller, true number than a bigger, invented one.

06Known limitations

Checks run on the initial HTML without executing JavaScript — deliberately, because that is how many AI crawlers read the web, but it means single-page-app websites can score lower on content checks than what a human sees. Detection is text-pattern based and errs generous: a false "missing" is treated as the worst error the tool can make. And a handful of checks (opening hours, credentials, reviews mentioned) detect textual signals, not verified facts.

07Versioning

This is methodology version 1.1 (August 2026). Version 1.1 made the Local Signals component business-type aware: the checker now asks whether customers visit your premises, and service-area or online businesses are no longer penalised for the absence of a public address, map embed or opening hours — those checks become informational, while a visible contact route still counts. Every report carries its methodology version, so scores from different versions are never silently compared. When the methodology changes, this page changes with it. The composite HighRegard Score that combines this Website Score with Maps, AI visibility, reputation and authority has its own draft methodology, published before it is used.