Methodology
A score is a claim. It should come with its derivation.
Heuristic tools produce numbers that move for reasons you cannot inspect. Obcend publishes the ruleset, the weights, and the arithmetic, so any score can be recomputed by hand from the findings list.
Determinism
Why we discard uncertain observations
Every rule executes three times across independent crawl workers. If the three runs disagree, the observation is suppressed and logged as unstable rather than reported as a finding.
This costs coverage. A handful of genuinely intermittent conditions never make it into a report. We accept that trade because a report where one finding in twenty is noise is a report nobody trusts — and an untrusted report changes nothing.
Versioning
Rulesets are pinned, not rolling
A run records the ruleset version it executed. Comparisons across runs are only offered when the versions match, or when the changelog delta is shown alongside the comparison.
Rules are added and retired openly. If your score moves and your site did not change, the changelog will say why.
Scoring
The formula, in full
Composite integrity is a weighted mean of category scores. Each category score is the proportion of rule evaluations that passed, weighted by severity.
category_score = 1 - ( Σ severity_weight(f) for f in failures
/ Σ severity_weight(r) for r in evaluated )
composite = Σ ( category_weight × category_score ) × 100
severity_weight: critical 8 · high 5 · medium 3 · low 1| Category | Weight | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Security | 0.30 | Header strictness, transport, exposure |
| Accessibility | 0.25 | WCAG 2.2 A/AA mechanical failures |
| Crawl integrity | 0.20 | Status anomalies, redirect depth |
| Indexation | 0.15 | Canonical and directive agreement |
| Delivery | 0.10 | Blocking resources, cache correctness |
- CategorySecurityWeight0.30BasisHeader strictness, transport, exposure
- CategoryAccessibilityWeight0.25BasisWCAG 2.2 A/AA mechanical failures
- CategoryCrawl integrityWeight0.20BasisStatus anomalies, redirect depth
- CategoryIndexationWeight0.15BasisCanonical and directive agreement
- CategoryDeliveryWeight0.10BasisBlocking resources, cache correctness
Limits
What Obcend does not claim
Overstating capability is the fastest way to lose an audience that reads carefully.
- Obcend does not predict rankings, revenue, or conversion outcomes. It reports observable conditions.
- Obcend does not assess design quality, editorial judgement, or brand fit. Those are not mechanically decidable.
- Mechanical accessibility checks cover a subset of WCAG 2.2. They do not substitute for manual and assistive-technology testing, and reports say so.
- A passing score is the absence of detected failures, not a guarantee of correctness.
See a deterministic audit of your own site
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