How we measure your site

We start with your website’s technical foundations. Our checks draw on Google’s technical requirements and guidance from W3C and MDN to identify what needs attention first.

Pages we inspect

We start with the page you enter, then your homepage. We find more pages through links on the pages we check and through your sitemap, then pick from different sections of your site, such as /blog or /products, so one section doesn’t fill the sample. We follow your robots.txt rules, and our bot page explains how to allow or limit our checks. Pages that are neither linked nor in a sitemap won’t be found.

The report covers only the pages checked. It doesn’t estimate how common a problem is across your whole site.

We read server HTML and response headers. We do not render JavaScript or submit forms.

What the scores cover

Access & discovery covers page responses, crawl and indexing directives, server-visible content and sitemaps. Page essentials covers titles, descriptions, mobile viewport, language and image text. Secure connection covers HTTPS and secure form submissions.

Higher scores mean fewer scored problems were found in the inspected sample. A score of 100 does not mean every page or check passed. Scores do not predict traffic, rankings or AI visibility, and crawl checks do not confirm Google indexing.

Findings that need your judgment

Some findings depend on context we can’t see from outside your website, such as whether a page is meant to stay out of search results. We flag these under Needs attention for you to review. They do not affect your score.

Unavailable checks

“Some checks unavailable” means evidence is missing for part of a category. The report explains why beside the score. Unavailable checks never count as passes; “Not assessed” means there was not enough evidence to give a score.

A provisional score can change as more evidence becomes available. Scores based on different coverage are not directly comparable.

Additional measurements

When available, Google PageSpeed Insights provides a simulated mobile performance measurement. It is separate from the foundations score. How Validfold uses PageSpeed.