How we grade websites
Every grade our tool hands out can be traced to a measurement. This page explains exactly what we measure, how it's weighted, and what we can't measure — in plain English.
The short version
We fetch your live homepage the way a search engine does, run it through Google's own PageSpeed test, parse the page's code for structured data and SEO fundamentals, and score seven categories from 0–100. Your overall grade is a weighted average: A is 90 or above, B is 80–89, C is 70–79, D is 60–69, and F is below 60. Nothing is hand-adjusted; the same site graded twice gets the same treatment both times.
The seven categories and their weights
| Category | Weight | What it means for you |
|---|---|---|
| Performance / Core Web Vitals | 22% | How fast your site loads and responds on a phone. |
| AEO / Structured Data | 18% | Whether AI assistants and Google's smart features can actually read what your business is. |
| On-Page SEO | 16% | The on-page basics search engines expect. |
| Content & Copy | 10% | Whether there's enough substance on the page for search engines and AI to work with. |
| Conversion & Lead Gen | 12% | Whether a visitor who likes what they see can easily become a lead. |
| Accessibility | 10% | Whether people using screen readers, or just a phone in sunlight, can use your site. |
| Technical Foundation | 12% | The health of the foundation your site is built on. |
Weights reflect what moves revenue for a typical local or small business: speed and AI-search visibility lead because they decide whether you get found at all.
How each category is measured
Performance / Core Web Vitals
We run Google's own PageSpeed test (the same one at pagespeed.web.dev) in mobile mode and use Google's 0-100 performance score directly. We also report the raw numbers behind it: how long your main content takes to appear, how long scripts freeze the page, and how much the layout jumps around while loading.
AEO / Structured Data
We parse your page's structured data (machine-readable labels hidden in the code) and check for the five types that matter most for a business: your business identity, your products or services, FAQs, reviews, and page structure. Each type present earns points. No guessing — the markup is either there or it isn't.
On-Page SEO
Half the score is Google PageSpeed's own SEO check. The other half is ours: a proper page title, a meta description, exactly one main headline, a canonical URL, descriptive image alt text, and a robots.txt and sitemap. If a check can't run (say, our request for your sitemap fails), it's excluded from the math rather than counted against you.
Content & Copy
We count the words a visitor can actually see (code and scripts excluded), look for FAQ-style content that answers real questions, and check heading structure. This category is heuristic, so we label it “estimated” — volume isn't the same as quality, and we say so.
Conversion & Lead Gen
We look for a real contact form (with enough fields to follow up on), a tap-to-call phone link, visible calls-to-action, and a clear path to a contact or booking page. Also labeled “estimated” — we measure the plumbing, not the persuasion.
Accessibility
Mostly Google's accessibility score, blended with our own check of image alt attributes. We follow the same standards Google does: images marked as decorative pass, and only images with no alt attribute at all count against you.
Technical Foundation
HTTPS, security headers, how many scripts and stylesheets the page carries, page weight, and whether the site runs on a heavy page-builder stack or legacy libraries like jQuery. Bloat caps how fast and stable a site can ever be, so it costs points.
What we're honest about
- "Estimated" labels. Content and Conversion (and any category where Google's test was unavailable) are heuristic. We mark them "estimated" on your results and in the report rather than presenting them as lab measurements.
- Score wobble. Google's performance test naturally varies a few points between runs — that's true at pagespeed.web.dev too. A site near a grade boundary can flip a letter on a re-run. The findings underneath don't change.
- Homepage only. The free grade audits your homepage — the page search engines and visitors judge first. It doesn't crawl your whole site.
- Client-rendered sites. We read your page's served HTML the way crawlers first do. If your site only shows content after running JavaScript, some categories will score low — which is itself a finding worth knowing about.
- We grade ourselves. panicciventures.com goes through this exact tool, and we publish the result. Run it yourself anytime.
The paid reports
The $24.99 standard report doesn't change your grades — it explains them: every finding with what we measured and why it matters, the raw metrics, and a Google Business Profile baseline (your rating, reviews, and visibility gaps on Google Maps).
The $49.99 Pro report adds three things no cheap tool bundles: a competitor comparison (you name one competitor and we run their site through the exact same audit, side-by-side), a 30-day action plan (your findings re-sorted by impact vs. effort into a week-by-week checklist), and a live AI visibility check (we ask a leading AI assistant about your business at report time and print exactly what it knows, whether it would recommend you, and who it names instead).
For context, a manual audit at this depth is typically a $500–$2,000+ agency deliverable, and competitor analyses alone usually start around $500. And if you decide to work with us, your report purchase is credited in full toward your first month— so either report effectively costs nothing if we end up fixing it together.