Scoring methodology
How Kweri scores your page
Technical excellence doesn’t compensate for UX friction.
The short answer
The overall score is an AI verdict on how effectively your page converts visitors. It is not a mathematical average of the four pillar scores. UX and messaging carry the most weight — because that’s what determines whether a real person stays, understands, trusts, and acts.
A page can score 99 on Performance, 92 on Accessibility, and 100 on SEO and still land in the 60s overall, because the synthesiser is asking a different question: not “does this page pass technical checks?” but “would a stranger convert here?”
The four pillars
Performance
ModerateHow fast the page loads and responds for real users. Drawn from Google's Core Web Vitals — Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint, and Cumulative Layout Shift — using field data from the Chrome UX Report where available, and Lighthouse lab data as a fallback.
Accessibility
ModerateWhether the page is usable by people with disabilities, assessed by axe-core against WCAG 2.2. Important to note: automated tools catch around 57% of accessibility issues. Kweri says so in every report.
SEO
ModerateTechnical signals that affect search visibility and AI discoverability — titles, meta descriptions, canonical URLs, structured data, robots.txt, sitemaps, and AI-crawler readiness (llms.txt, GPTBot, PerplexityBot).
UX & Content
High — carries the most weightWhether the page's messaging is clear, the hierarchy guides the eye, the call to action is persuasive, the tone fits the audience, and a stranger would trust the page enough to convert. Assessed by a language model calibrated against real designer judgement.
Why UX and messaging dominate
Performance, Accessibility, and SEO are measurable signals. They matter — but they’re inputs to conversion, not the conversion itself. A page that loads in 800ms, passes WCAG, and ranks on page one can still fail the moment a visitor reads the headline and doesn’t understand what they’re being offered.
UX and messaging are what happen at the decision point. Whether the value proposition is clear. Whether the call to action is persuasive or merely present. Whether competing elements dilute the primary goal. Whether the tone matches the audience and builds enough trust to convert. These are the questions a senior conversion specialist would ask — and they’re the questions Kweri weights most heavily.
Most audit tools don’t touch this layer at all. Kweri is built around it.
The five scoring bands
- 85–100Minor polish remaining
No significant friction. Visitors can find what they need, trust the page, and act on the CTA. What's left is incremental — copywriting refinement, visual polish, or A/B optimisation.
- 70–84Solid foundations, fixable gaps
The page works, but there are clear opportunities with real conversion impact. Typically one or two UX or messaging issues that are straightforward to address and worth prioritising.
- 55–69Notable friction with real conversion cost
Multiple issues across pillars that are actively costing you visitors. This is the most common band for pages that score well on Lighthouse but haven't had a UX review.
- 40–54Significant structural or messaging problems
The page has fundamental issues — unclear value proposition, confusing hierarchy, broken trust signals, or misaligned messaging. Performance metrics may look fine while conversion quietly fails.
- Below 40Fundamental issues blocking most visitors
Visitors are likely leaving before they understand what the page is offering. Issues at this level are usually structural: no clear primary action, messaging that doesn't match the audience, or a layout that fights the eye.
What the score is not
The score is not a Lighthouse score. Lighthouse measures technical performance and some accessibility — it has no concept of messaging quality, visual hierarchy, or persuasion. A 100 on Lighthouse and a 60 on Kweri can coexist easily.
The score is not a pass/fail. Every page has friction; the question is whether that friction is worth fixing now. The findings, ranked by impact, tell you where to spend your time. The score tells you the magnitude of the problem.
The score is not a ranking signal. It reflects the visitor experience, not search engine opinion. SEO is one pillar; it contributes to the overall score but doesn’t dominate it.
FAQ
Why doesn't the overall score match the average of my pillar scores?
Because it isn't an average. The synthesiser is given the pillar scores as inputs but makes its own judgement, weighted toward UX and messaging quality. A page with 99 Performance, 92 Accessibility, 100 SEO, and 74 UX & Content will typically score in the 60s overall — because the synthesiser is asking "would a real visitor convert?" not "what's the median score?"
Can I improve my score by fixing Performance or SEO alone?
You can move the score, but not dramatically. Performance and SEO contribute to the overall verdict, but UX and messaging dominate. The most reliable way to raise your overall score is to address the UX & Content findings first.
Why does UX and messaging carry so much weight?
Because that's what actually determines whether a visitor converts. A fast page that fails to communicate its value proposition clearly, or whose CTA competes with three other equally-weighted actions, will lose visitors at the decision point — regardless of its Lighthouse score. We built Kweri to tell you what matters to a real person on the page, not what matters to a crawler.
The score changed between two audits where I didn't change anything. Why?
Three things can shift a score without you touching the page: third-party content (ads, embeds, chat widgets) that behaves differently between captures; real-user performance data from Google, which updates over time; and the AI synthesiser, which evaluates the full page state on each run. Small movements (±3 points) are normal variance. A large shift usually means something on the page changed — check the findings delta for what moved.
See also
See what these are costing your site.
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