# Why there is no score

> We built a citation-readiness percentage, then deleted it. What was wrong with it, and what we do instead.

Canonical: https://crawlwise.site/learn/honest-measurement

Learn · honest limits

This product shipped a citation-readiness percentage. It had weights — a title was worth eight points, structured data ten, a canonical four — and it added them up into a number that looked authoritative. Then we deleted it.

### What was wrong with it

No published research establishes those weights. We chose them. They were the shape of a measurement without being one: a page could score 82 and never be cited, and a page could score 41 and be quoted in every answer. The number did not predict the thing it appeared to measure, and it was not reproducible — change the weights and you change the verdict without changing the page.

The failure was not that the arithmetic was wrong. It was that the output was formatted like a fact. A percentage has a denominator and a method behind it, and readers reasonably assume both exist. Ours did not, and the honesty of every other number on the page is what made that one persuasive.

### What replaced it

**An observation, not a grade.** The readiness review reports each signal as present, absent, or unknown, and says plainly when a missing one is a legitimate choice rather than a gap. Nothing is added up. The tool that replaced the score lives at `lib/tools/inspect.ts` and its own comment records why it changed.

**An answer, not a rating.** When a brand is invisible in AI answers, the useful question is why. The diagnosis is ordered on purpose: a crawler that cannot read the site is the answer, and everything below it is marked deferred with “nothing else matters until that is fixed”.

**“Not measured” instead of zero.** If a vendor did not return a value, a request timed out, or a check could not be evaluated from outside, the report says so and keeps that state distinct from a failure.

**A score with its denominator, or no score.** The checklist score that remains is our own count of the checks that applied, published beside the denominator, null when nothing scorable applied, and never presented as a Google signal.

**One percentage in the whole product.** Uptime. It has a numerator and a denominator that are both rows in a database — an up count over a total count — which is the only reason it is allowed.

### What this costs us

Scores sell. A number that goes up is easier to show a client than a list of findings, and every competitor ships one. Removing ours made the product harder to explain and less impressive in a screenshot. We did it anyway, because a number nobody can reproduce is a liability the moment a reader checks it — and the readers who check are the ones worth having.

It also cost us a feature we could have kept alongside the honest parts. The temptation was to publish it “for guidance”. That is the version that does the most damage: authoritative enough to act on, hedged enough to disown.

### How to hold us to it

The rule is easy to state and easy to check: **no invented numbers, ever**. Every check definition is published at [/methodology](https://crawlwise.site/methodology) with what it measures and what it cannot, and as [JSON](https://crawlwise.site/methodology/checks.json) so it can be diffed. The [limits page](https://crawlwise.site/limits) is the other half of the same promise. And if you find a number on this site that we cannot point at a source for, that is the most serious bug we can receive — [report it](https://crawlwise.site/feedback) and it goes on the public record with what we did about it.

[What crawlwise cannot tell you](https://crawlwise.site/limits) · [Check methodology](https://crawlwise.site/methodology) · [Feedback record](https://crawlwise.site/feedback/record)