How we estimate the impact of fixes

We have not measured what your traffic would do. We distribute a fixed, published budget of potential across the criteria that apply to your site, and weight each by how broken it currently is. Two sites with the same failures get the same numbers. Nothing here is a promise about outcomes.

A budget is the total upside the model will ever attribute to one channel, for a maximally broken site. Fixing everything cannot yield more than this, because the model never distributes more than it has.

The AI budget is roughly three times the SEO one. That is a modelling assumption, not a finding: AI-sourced traffic starts from a low base and is growing, so adapting for it yields a larger relative gain than further tuning of a mature search channel. These are calibration constants — revising them means issuing a new model version.

Each channel budget is divided between the 12 audit categories by fixed shares. Each column adds up to 100%.

Within a category, a criterion takes a portion proportional to its weight in our methodology — the same weight that drives the score. We do not keep a second set of weights for impact, because two weightings would eventually disagree.

liveShare(K, ch) = SHARE(K, ch) / Σ SHARE(K', ch)
potential(c, ch) = BUDGET(ch) × liveShare(K, ch) × Weight(c) / Σ Weight(K)
impact(c, ch)    = potential(c, ch) × statusFactor(c)

The normalizer matters when a whole category does not apply to your site. Its share is redistributed across the categories that do, so the budget stays the ceiling for a maximally broken site of your kind — rather than making some kinds of site structurally capable of less.

• Failed — the full potential is still on the table.
• Partial — half of it.
• Passed — nothing left to gain here.
• No verdict at all (not applicable, or the engine could not tell) — zero. No verdict, no promise.

The methodology comprises 132 checks.

Only a subset applies to any given site, chosen by its type. The rest are skipped: they take no share of the score and do not affect the final result. A personal site is never offered percentage points for product markup it has no reason to have.

It does not account for your industry, your competition, or your current traffic. It is not calibrated against measured outcomes — doing that would require traffic telemetry we do not collect. Treat the figures as a way to rank fixes against each other, not as a forecast.