Rubric v1.2.0 · scanner v1.4.0
What has changed in the scoring
A versioned score is only worth anything if you can find out what the versions mean. Otherwise “your score went up” is a claim nobody can check.
Worth saying plainly: several of the changes below were found by running our own tools on our own site, and each of them happened to raise our score. We think each is defensible on its merits — the reasoning is in the entry — but “trust us” is not something you should accept from the party doing the scoring, so here is the record instead. Every entry says which way it moved scores.
- rubric v1.2.0
The rubric now credits the schema types we actually recommend
Our per-sector advice told documentation sites to publish TechArticle and APIReference, while the scoring only recognised a fixed list that included neither. A site could follow our advice exactly and score no better for it. The two lists are now reconciled, and a check in the build confirms there is no gap between what we recommend and what we count.
Effect on scoresRaises scores for sites already publishing sector-appropriate markup, including ours by 1 point. No site scores lower.
- rubric v1.1.0scanner v1.4.0
Attribution no longer requires a named person
The trust check looked for a byline, a Person entity, or a 'by Firstname Lastname' pattern. That quietly penalised every site attributing its content to the organisation publishing it — which is normal and correct for company documentation. It now also accepts an author declared in JSON-LD, or visible 'maintained by' / 'reviewed by' text.
Effect on scoresRaises scores for company-published content that was previously marked down for not having a personal byline. Ours rose 2 points. No site scores lower.
- scanner v1.3.0
Pages your robots.txt disallows are no longer sampled
We were fetching and scoring pages sites explicitly tell crawlers to skip — sign-in and registration forms, typically. Impolite, and it measured the wrong thing: content quality judged partly on a page no crawler will ever read.
Effect on scoresRaises scores for any site with a disallowed admin or auth area, which is most of them. Ours rose 4 points. Also reduces the number of requests we make to your server.
- scanner v1.2.0
Duplicate pages, JavaScript detection, and quote verification
Redirects could collapse two sampled URLs onto one page, counting it twice and skewing every 'N of M pages' proportion. The JavaScript-dependency check fired on pages with real text and was tightened. And the grounding gate that verifies a model's quotes was rejecting truthful evidence: models answer with several real fragments joined by an ellipsis, and typographic apostrophes did not match straight ones.
Effect on scoresFewer false criticals. The quote-verification fix in particular stopped sites being told a model could not answer questions their pages plainly answer.
- scanner v1.1.0
Page sampling favours breadth
The per-section cap only applied after half the page budget was spent, so a large blog could take most of the sample before anything describing the business was considered. Sections are also now detected past a leading locale segment, and the homepage's own links are always merged with the sitemap.
Effect on scoresScores move in both directions: the sample now reflects the site rather than its largest section.
- rubric v1.0.0scanner v1.0.0
First published rubric
100 points across machine access, discovery files, content structure, structured data and trust signals.
Effect on scoresBaseline.
The rubric version covers the scoring weights and what each check accepts. The scanner version covers anything that changes a measurement — page selection, extraction, detection. Comparisons across a scanner change are labelled as ours rather than presented as your site’s movement, on the report and in the weekly email. Full detail on how the score works.
Last reviewed . Maintained by CiteFiles — corrections to hello@citefiles.com.