What a score means

What does a score of 100 mean?

That every page read passed every rule mttr checks, counted by weight across the four stages. The pages are well formed for a crawler and an assistant: they can be reached, understood, trusted and acted on. It does not mean an assistant cites the site.

Does it get sites cited?

It does on the sites we run with mttr. Every week we ask Gemini each one’s real searches, the ones its Search Console shows people using. As of October 24, 2026, 7 of them are cited for their own searches, each in first place for at least one, and three of them for half or more of the searches asked. 9 of them turn up among the sources Gemini gives for the questions mttr asks about every line of work.

Across 1,890 sites Gemini answered questions about, a cited site outscored an uncited one 85% of the time. That is the pattern every report is built on. Each report also shows the answers themselves, so a site can see where it is cited, not only its score.

How the questions are asked, how a citation is decided, and what the comparison does and does not show are set out in the methodology.

Four stages

Each stage is the share of its checks that pass, counting each check by its rule’s weight. A rule about the whole site, such as whether robots.txt lets crawlers in, is one check. A rule about pages is one check on every page it applies to, so a rule checked on 200 pages is 200 checks. A check waiting for a person is left out until a person reads it.

Say a stage has two rules on a site of 200 pages. One weighs 4 and passes on 180 pages; the other weighs 2 and passes on all 200. The stage is 4 × 180 + 2 × 200 over 4 × 200 + 2 × 200: 1,120 of 1,200, which rounds to 93.

How the stages add up

The four stages are added by their share of the score. For a site whose stages came out like this:

When a site is closed

Some rules close a site to crawlers when they fail, such as a robots.txt that lets nobody in. If one fails for the whole site, on the home page, or on more than half the pages, the score is held at 20 or less, whatever else passes. A score for pages nobody can reach would mislead.

A site that is not live yet

A draft read sets aside the rules a closed site cannot pass, such as a sitemap search engines can see. The score then says how ready the site is for the day it opens.

Why a score moves with nothing changed

• The rulebook changed. History says when two reads were judged by different rulebooks.
• The read reached different pages, often because it stopped at its limit.
• A page that was slow or down the first time answered the second.

Sources