Scoring a Page's Meta Tags 0-100: The Rubric Behind Our Analyzer

A meta tag audit is a pile of binary checks. Title present, yes or no. Title in range, yes or no. Description present. One H1. og:image set. Canonical present. Run them all and you get a few dozen booleans. The problem is that a wall of green and red checkmarks does not motivate anyone. People glance at it, feel vaguely bad, and close the tab. A single number does motivate. "You are at 62" is a thing a person will act on. But a number only works if it is honest, and a number is only honest if it is explainable. So we set one hard constraint before writing any scoring code: every point a page loses has to trace back to a named check with a specific fix. No mystery deductions. If you are at 62 and not 100, the tool can point at the exact items that cost you the other 38. That constraint shaped every decision that followed, and it is the reason the rubric looks the way it does. This is the write-up of how we got from a pile of booleans to a number we are willing to defend. Choosing the dimensions and the weights The first decision was how to group the checks. We landed on five dimensions, each with a fixed weight, and the overall score is their weighted average: Basic meta, 30 percent. Title tag and meta description. Headings, 20 percent. H1 count and heading-level hierarchy. Open Graph, 20 percent. og:title, og:description, og:image, og:url. Twitter Card, 15 percent. twitter:card, twitter:title, twitter:description, twitter:image. Technical, 15 percent. Canonical, html lang, viewport, robots. The weights are the opinionated part, and they encode what we actually believe about how pages get found now. Basic meta gets 30 percent, the largest slice, because the title and description are the strings an AI engine quotes when it summarizes or cites a page. They are the highest-value characters on the whole page, so a gap there should cost the most. Technical gets the smallest slice at 15 percent, but for a subtler reason than "it matters least." Technical failures are rarer