Severity Rubric
Every finding has two independent scores: severity (impact if real) and confidence (certainty that it’s actually a problem). These are set by the check definition — not computed dynamically — but they’re calibrated against real-world SEO impact.
Severity levels
Section titled “Severity levels”Critical
Section titled “Critical”Reserved for findings that block indexation, cause or risk deindexation, or break the site for all crawlers or users.
Examples:
- noindex directive on a revenue-generating page that appears unintentional
- robots.txt
Disallow: /for Googlebot (blocks entire site crawl) - Canonical loop (page A canonicalizes to page B, page B canonicalizes to page A — neither can be indexed)
- SSL certificate expired
Decision rule: Would a reasonable SEO immediately call this an emergency? If yes, Critical.
Findings that significantly harm crawlability, rankings, or AI visibility for important pages, but don’t outright block indexation.
Examples:
- Canonical pointing to a URL that returns 404
- Key landing pages blocked to AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot) while allowed to Googlebot
- Broken internal links to pages with significant external backlinks
- CWV scores in the “Poor” band for high-traffic pages
Decision rule: Would an experienced SEO prioritize this in the same sprint? If yes, High.
Medium
Section titled “Medium”Findings that degrade performance, miss optimization opportunities, or affect a subset of pages in a way that adds up.
Examples:
- Missing self-canonical on paginated pages
- Images without explicit dimensions (contributing to CLS)
- Sitemap contains redirecting URLs (should contain final destinations)
- LCP image not preloaded
Decision rule: Would this go in a quarterly SEO backlog? Medium.
Minor optimizations, cosmetic issues, or informational observations where the risk is real but the impact is limited.
Examples:
- Meta description exceeds recommended length
- outbound link using generic anchor text
- HTTP/3 not enabled (nice to have, not urgent)
Decision rule: Would a thorough SEO note this in an audit document but not block anything on it? Low.
Observations only. No action required, but useful context for understanding the site.
Examples:
- Total crawled pages
- IndexNow endpoint detected
llms.txtpresent (noted but not scored)
Confidence levels
Section titled “Confidence levels”High confidence
Section titled “High confidence”Evidence is unambiguous and direct. The check found exactly what it was looking for.
Examples: X-Robots-Tag: noindex in HTTP response headers; canonical tag value parsed directly from HTML; robots.txt directive parsed per spec.
Medium confidence
Section titled “Medium confidence”Evidence strongly suggests the issue but involves some interpretation or comparison.
Examples: Content hash comparison (may have false positives if content legitimately differs between passes); redirect chain detection (might be intentional architecture).
Low confidence
Section titled “Low confidence”Heuristic-based detection. The finding may be accurate, but context matters.
Examples: Soft 404 candidate (detected by low word count, but page might be intentionally minimal); duplicate cluster (content similarity may be intentional for a site with templated product variants).
Why separate severity and confidence
Section titled “Why separate severity and confidence”A high-severity, low-confidence finding (e.g., a suspected soft 404 on a high-traffic page) deserves investigation — but you shouldn’t immediately file a bug or change canonicals based on it. A low-severity, high-confidence finding (e.g., missing H2 tags) is definitely real but probably not urgent.
This two-axis model prevents noisy heuristics from appearing as critical issues, while still surfacing them for human review at appropriate priority.
Scoring and business impact
Section titled “Scoring and business impact”The audit score visible in the dashboard weights findings by severity × traffic. A Critical finding on a page with 10,000 monthly visits affects your score much more than the same Critical finding on a page with 10 visits. This is intentional — not all Critical findings are equally urgent for a given business.