How SEO Toolbox Online scores a site

We start from the URL you enter, read robots.txt and the XML sitemap, and fetch up to 10 pages on the same host. Our crawler identifies itself as SEOToolboxBot, follows robots.txt for every page it discovers, and fetches only public URLs: it refuses private network addresses and will not follow redirects into them. More about our crawler.

Each check returns one of five results: Passed, Needs attention, Failed, Not applicable or Informational. Not applicable and informational results never lower your score.

Within a category, each check is weighted by severity (critical 5, high 3, medium 2, low 1). Categories are then combined with fixed weights:

If a category has no checks that apply to your site, its weight is shared among the others. The score runs from 0 to 100 and maps to a grade: A+ from 97, A from 93, A- from 90, B+ from 87, B from 83, B- from 80, C+ from 77, C from 73, C- from 70, D+ from 67, D from 63, D- from 60, and F below 60.

The weights do not mirror Google’s ranking systems, which are not public. They reflect how much each area tends to block crawling, indexing or understanding of a page. When we change the model we version it, so older reports keep the score they were given.

No, and the report says so. Our performance checks are lab data: one page load in a real Chromium browser on our servers. Where available, we also run Google’s PageSpeed Insights, which reports Lighthouse lab results and, for sites with enough traffic, Chrome UX Report field data from real visitors. Google’s page experience assessment uses field data, so a lab result is a diagnostic, not your Search Console score.

It measures signals we can verify: whether AI crawlers are allowed in robots.txt, whether the page is readable without JavaScript, whether it has Organization and WebSite structured data, author information and answer-style headings, whether the brand name is used consistently, and whether optional files such as llms.txt are valid. It cannot measure whether an AI assistant will cite you; no tool can do that from your HTML alone.

Each check links to the documentation behind it. Thresholds such as title length are guidelines, not Google rules, and the check text says so.

Backlinks from third-party indexes, keyword rankings, search volume and anything that needs access to your Search Console or analytics.