Scoring

Why your score changed

Four things move a health score, and only one of them is your site. How to tell which one it was before you go looking for a change nobody made.

Four things move a health score. Only one of them is your site, and it is not usually the one people check first.

1. You crawled a different number of pages

The score is a rate per page, not a total. Raising the page limit from 100 to 500 usually raises the score, because most of the pages you added were fine and they dilute the ones that are not.

This is the most common cause and the easiest to rule out: the number of pages crawled is on the strip beside the score, on both reports. If it changed, that is your answer, and the two numbers were never comparable.

2. The catalogue grew

Checks get added. The catalogue has gone from 43 to 80 in a few weeks, and a check added on Tuesday finds problems that were on your site on Monday and were simply not being counted.

An existing report is never re-scored behind your back, so a report you sent a client last month still says what it said. But the next crawl is scored by the newer catalogue, and the difference between the two is partly us, not you. Every crawl records which catalogue version scored it, and a comparison that crosses a change says so rather than subtracting across it.

3. Something on the site actually changed

The one everybody assumes first. The Changes section of a report exists for exactly this: it buckets findings into new, resolved and persisting, against the previous crawl - so you can see what moved rather than inferring it from two numbers.

Worth knowing: a page that stopped answering 200 between crawls has its findings disappear, which looks like progress and is not. That case is called out rather than counted as resolved.

4. A finding was marked done or ignored

Statuses feed the score. Marking a finding as ignored removes its cost, which is the point - but it means a score can improve without anything on the site changing. The Score breakdown shows what each category actually took, so an unexplained improvement is visible there rather than mysterious.

How to tell which it was, in order

• Compare the pages crawled on both reports first. Different sizes, different rates, no further mystery.
• Check whether the two crawls were scored by the same catalogue version - it is printed under the score.
• Open Changes, which answers the question directly for anything left.
• If the score moved and Changes is empty, look at statuses: something was marked done or ignored.

Last changed 2026-08-10. Every check this refers to is listed on the checks page.