Understanding your audit score

The Daylytix audit score is a single number from 0 to 100 that gives you a quick signal of the overall SEO and technical health of a website. It is not a vanity metric — it is a weighted composite of real checks across eight distinct categories, each of which reflects how search engines and users actually experience your site.

This article explains exactly how the score is calculated, what each category contributes, how issue severity affects your score, and how to use the score history to demonstrate progress to clients over time.

Score scale at a glance

Score range	Rating	What it means
85–100	Excellent	Site is in strong technical health. Focus on content and link building.
65–84	Good	A few meaningful issues to address but fundamentals are solid.
45–64	Needs Work	Multiple categories dragging the score down. Prioritize critical issues.
0–44	Poor	Serious technical problems likely impacting crawling, indexing, and rankings.

The 8 scoring categories

The overall score is a weighted average of eight category scores. Each category is scored independently from 0–100, then combined using the weights below. These weights reflect the relative importance of each area to organic search performance.

Category	Weight	What is measured
Technical SEO	25%	Crawlability, robots.txt, XML sitemap, canonical tags, redirect chains, hreflang, HTTPS, response codes, page depth
Performance	20%	PageSpeed Insights mobile and desktop scores, Core Web Vitals (LCP, CLS, FID/INP, FCP, TTFB), render-blocking resources
On-Page SEO	20%	Title tag quality, meta description presence and length, H1 tags, heading hierarchy, content word count, duplicate content
Security	10%	SSL validity, HTTPS redirect enforcement, security headers (CSP, HSTS, X-Frame-Options), mixed content warnings
Accessibility	10%	Images without alt text, empty anchor links, generic link text, heading violations, form inputs without labels
Content	7%	Thin content pages, near-duplicate content, content decay, topical authority cluster coverage
Links	5%	Internal link distribution, orphan pages, underlinked pages, broken internal links
Structured Data	3%	JSON-LD presence and validity, schema type coverage vs. recommended types for detected page types

Issue severity and how it affects your score

Within each category, individual checks are classified into three severity levels. The severity determines how many points are deducted from that category's score.

Severity	Label	Impact on score	Example issues
Critical	Ranking Risk	Large deduction — each unresolved critical issue in a category reduces that category score substantially	No sitemap, blocked by robots.txt, missing HTTPS redirect, LCP > 4s, pages with no H1
Warning	Improvement Needed	Moderate deduction — meaningful issues that should be resolved but do not cause immediate harm	Duplicate meta descriptions, images without alt text, redirect chains longer than 2 hops, slow TTFB
Notice	Informational	Minor or no deduction — good to know, act when time allows	Pages with fewer than 100 words, missing structured data on a blog post, generic anchor text instances

Within the audit results, each check card shows its severity badge, the number of affected URLs, a plain-English explanation, and sample affected pages. Critical issues appear first in every category view, sorted by estimated impact.

Example score breakdown

Here is a realistic example for a mid-size e-commerce site with a few known issues:

Category	Category score	Weight	Contribution
Technical SEO	78	25%	19.5
Performance	54	20%	10.8
On-Page SEO	82	20%	16.4
Security	90	10%	9.0
Accessibility	61	10%	6.1
Content	70	7%	4.9
Links	80	5%	4.0
Structured Data	45	3%	1.4
Overall Score	—		72

In this example, the biggest opportunity is Performance (score 54, weight 20%) — fixing Core Web Vitals and render-blocking resources would push the overall score from 72 toward the low 80s.

Score history over time

Every time you run an audit for a domain, Daylytix saves the score snapshot. The History panel (sidebar → History) shows:

• A line chart of overall score over time for the selected domain
• KPI delta cards comparing the latest audit against the previous one (score change, issue count change, accessibility score change, and more)
• Individual charts for performance scores, Core Web Vitals, and page count
• A chronological table of all past audits with one-click access to each

Score history is the most compelling evidence of SEO progress you can show a client. Run audits consistently — once a month at minimum — and the history chart becomes a clear before/after narrative of your work.

Tips for improving your score quickly