SEO Audit Scorecard
A real SEO audit is not one guessed number — it is measured data from the page itself. Paste a URL and press Run audit: this tool calls Google’s PageSpeed Insights, runs a full Lighthouse pass, and hands you the four category scores, your real Core Web Vitals, an overall score, and a fix list built from the audits that actually failed — biggest wins first. The audit runs on Google’s servers, so give it ~20 seconds.
Enter a URL and this tool runs a live Lighthouse audit through Google PageSpeed Insights. It returns four category scores — SEO, Performance, Accessibility and Best Practices — a weighted overall score and verdict band, your Core Web Vitals (LCP, INP, CLS, using real-user field data where Google has it and lab values otherwise), and a prioritised fix list built from the audits that actually failed, ordered by impact. Core Web Vitals are judged against Google’s published 75th-percentile thresholds; the overall weighting is an RGM model, since Google does not publish one composite SEO number.
SEO Audit Scorecard inputs and result
| Category | Score | Weight | Status |
|---|
How to use this calculator
- Enter the page URLType or paste any public URL — a bare domain or a full path both work. The tool normalises it to a proper https address before auditing. Pages behind a login or firewall cannot be reached by Google’s crawler, so test public URLs.
- Pick the device profileLeave it on Mobile to match how Google primarily evaluates pages under mobile-first indexing, or switch to Desktop for a comparison. The Core Web Vitals and performance score shift between the two.
- Press Run audit and waitThis is a live network audit: PageSpeed Insights runs a full Lighthouse pass on Google’s servers, which takes roughly 10-25 seconds. The button shows “Analyzing…” while it works — leave the tab open.
- Read the score, categories and Core Web VitalsThe big number is the weighted overall; the table shows each Lighthouse category and its weight; the Core Web Vitals row shows LCP, INP and CLS with good / needs-improvement / poor colouring — real-user field data where Google has it, lab values otherwise.
- Work the action roadmap, lane by laneThe failing audits are triaged into lanes: critical fixes to do regardless, marketer quick wins you can ship today, developer priorities to hand off in order, and lower-priority items you can monitor or skip. Each one names the owner, the impact, the effort, the time, and the exact step. Start with the “do these 3” callout, clear the lanes top to bottom, then re-run to confirm the score moved. Export the full action list as CSV for your next planning conversation.
RGM Expert Says
We rebuilt this audit to run on real data rather than a self-reported checklist, because the honest version of an SEO audit is the one the page cannot argue with. PageSpeed Insights runs the same Lighthouse engine Google ships in Chrome, so the SEO, performance, accessibility and best-practices scores you see here are the scores Google’s own tooling produces — not our opinion of them. That matters in week one with a client, when the fastest way to end a debate about “is the site actually slow?” is to point at a measured Largest Contentful Paint from real Chrome users.
The part clients act on is the action roadmap, and that is where this tool stops being an audit and becomes an engine. A raw audit tells you a check failed; it does not tell you whether you or your developer should fix it, whether it is a fifteen-minute edit or a two-week project, or whether it is even worth doing. We attach that triage to every failing audit and sort the whole list into lanes — do-these-regardless fundamentals, marketer quick wins, developer priorities in handoff order, and the things you can safely ignore. An amateur gets the same prioritisation an experienced consultant would charge for, with the exact next step spelled out and copy-paste-ready where it can be. Teams routinely discover that the heroic content rewrite they scheduled matters less, this quarter, than three quick wins they could have shipped before lunch.
What the scorecard will not do is promise a ranking. A perfect Lighthouse run removes the self-inflicted handicaps that stop good content from being seen; it does not make the content the best answer to the query. Core Web Vitals are a genuine but lightweight signal, structured data earns rich results rather than higher positions on its own, and authority compounds slowly through earned links no audit can score. We treat a clean audit as the starting line and tell clients exactly that — fix the measurable problems, then go compete on usefulness and trust.
How it works
The tool sends your URL to Google PageSpeed Insights, which runs a full Lighthouse audit on Google’s servers and returns category scores (0-1, shown 0-100), per-audit results, and — where Google has enough real Chrome traffic — Core Web Vitals field data from the CrUX dataset. We weight the four categories into one overall score, judge each Core Web Vital against Google’s published thresholds, and turn the failing audits into a fix list ordered by impact.
- Lighthouse category score — Google’s 0-100 score for SEO, performance, accessibility or best practices, measured live by PageSpeed Insights.
- Overall score — the weighted average of the four categories; SEO (35) and Performance (30) carry the most weight in the RGM model.
- Core Web Vitals — LCP good at 2.5s or less, INP good at 200ms or less, CLS good at 0.1 or less, at the 75th percentile of real-user loads.
- Field vs lab — field data is from real Chrome users (CrUX); lab data is a single simulated load. Low-traffic URLs only have lab data.
Scores come live from Google PageSpeed Insights (Lighthouse). Core Web Vitals thresholds follow web.dev and Google Search Central. The four-category overall weighting is an RGM model — Google does not publish a single composite SEO number, so treat the overall score as prioritisation guidance, not the algorithm.
Why a live audit beats a self-scored checklist
Most free SEO checkers ask you to grade your own page from a dropdown, which bakes in exactly the blind spots a real audit is supposed to catch. You cannot reliably eyeball your own Largest Contentful Paint, and you will rarely admit the title is weak. Running the page through Google’s own Lighthouse engine removes the guesswork: the SEO, performance, accessibility and best-practices scores are measured from the page as it actually loads, so the numbers settle arguments instead of starting them.
Real Core Web Vitals are the clearest example. This tool pulls them from the Chrome User Experience Report — field data from real visitors — whenever Google has enough traffic for your URL, and falls back to a lab measurement when it does not. That distinction matters: a page can feel fast on your fast laptop and fast connection while real users on mid-range phones experience a slow, janky load. Field data shows you what those users actually get, which is what Google ranks on.
Finally, the fix list comes from the audits that genuinely failed, ordered by impact, so the work follows the points. A five-minute fix that unblocks crawling or kills a render-blocking script comes before a month-long project that nudges a single audit. We have watched this reordering reshape a quarter’s roadmap, because the biggest win is almost never the one a team was emotionally invested in. Audit, fix in order, re-audit — then go compete on the things no checklist can score.
The categories, weights and Core Web Vitals thresholds
The four Lighthouse categories, their share of the overall score, and the rule each is judged against. Weights are an RGM model; the category scores and Core Web Vitals come live from Google PageSpeed Insights against Google’s published thresholds.
| Category / metric | Weight or threshold | Source |
|---|---|---|
| SEO | 35% of overall | Lighthouse SEO category (live) |
| Performance | 30% of overall | Lighthouse performance category (live) |
| Accessibility | 20% of overall | Lighthouse accessibility category (live) |
| Best Practices | 15% of overall | Lighthouse best-practices category (live) |
| LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) | Good ≤ 2.5s, poor > 4.0s | CrUX field data / Lighthouse lab |
| INP (Interaction to Next Paint) | Good ≤ 200ms, poor > 500ms | CrUX field data / Lighthouse lab |
| CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) | Good ≤ 0.1, poor > 0.25 | CrUX field data / Lighthouse lab |
What search leaders say
The fundamentals are not optional, but they are not the finish line either. Once a page is crawlable, fast and clearly about something, the contest is whether it is genuinely the best answer.
Core Web Vitals are measured at the 75th percentile of real-user page loads, and all three metrics must be in the good range for a page to pass.