Lighthouse SEO score
The SEO score, from 0 to 100, shows whether a page passes Lighthouse’s basic checks for search engines: can they crawl and index it, does it have a title and a description, do links and images carry text that explains them? SEO stands for search engine optimization.
Why it matters
Section titled “Why it matters”If search engines can’t read a page, people can’t find it through search. These checks catch the technical obstacles: a page that tells search engines to stay away, a missing title, links that say only “read more”.
The score doesn’t measure rankings, and a perfect 100 doesn’t bring visitors on its own. What appears in search results depends far more on the content and how relevant it is. Think of the score as a check that nothing technical stands in the way.
What influences it
Section titled “What influences it”WordPress: The most common reason for a sharp drop on WordPress is a page that’s
blocked from indexing. The setting “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” under
Settings › Reading does that for the whole site, and SEO plugins can do it for single pages. It
makes sense on a staging site but is easy to forget when the site goes live. Lighthouse weighs
this check so heavily that it pulls the score far down on its own. The theme and SEO plugins also
produce the page title, the meta description and the canonical and hreflang tags.
Browser: Links without descriptive text, links that aren’t real links for a crawler, and images without alt text each cost points.
Server: The page has to answer with a successful status code, and the robots.txt
file has to be valid.
In Permo
Section titled “In Permo”Permo shows the SEO score as a small ring under Other categories on its PageSpeed page, from the same test as the Performance score. Its trend arrow appears from a change of 1 point, because this score only changes when the page changes.