When an SEO tool hands you 74/100, the only question that matters is: is that good? A single number means nothing without something to compare it against. This page is that comparison — the real scores of real sites, scanned with three different audit tools, with the full distribution shown.
Key findings
8 August 2026 – 25 August 2026, 40 unique sites across 12 countries.
- The median full-audit score is 86/100. 65% of audits reach 80+, and not a single one fell below 40. The technical foundation is in place on most sites.
- The average audit passes 34.4 of 45 checks yet still leaves 10.5 open items, of which 0.65 are critical.
- AI visibility behaves like a switch, not a dial. 10 scans scored A+ while 10 sat at D, with the B and C band almost empty. Sites are either prepared for AI search or untouched.
- llms.txt is almost universally missing. Absent in 81% of full audits and 40% of AI visibility scans. It takes ten minutes to add and nearly every competitor skips it.
- Keyword optimization is the real gap. The On-Page SEO Checker median is 22/100 with 45% of runs under 20. Pages are technically sound but aim at no query in particular.
- E-E-A-T signals are missing on roughly half of pages. 48% of audits found no author or date, and 43% of AI visibility scans found no byline.
All figures are a fixed snapshot and do not change until updated by hand. Any sample below 30 runs is explicitly labelled as a small sample.
Three tools at a glance
These three tools ask the same page three different questions. The All-in-One SEO Audit measures overall page health across 45 checks. The AI Visibility Checker asks whether the page can be read and cited by generative engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. The On-Page SEO Checker grades placement against one target keyword. The scores are therefore not interchangeable — but read together they show where the problem actually is.
| Tool | Runs | Sites | Median | Mean | Scored 80+ | Checks/run | Issues/run |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| All-in-One SEO Audit | 69 | 20 | 86 | 81.8 | 65% | 45.0 | 10.5 |
| AI Visibility Checker | 30 | 21 | 85 | 79.4 | 60% | 15.2 | 3.2 |
| On-Page SEO Checker (Keyword) | 11 | 3 | 22 | 33.1 | 18% | 8.0 | 5.5 |
“Issues/run” is the average number of checks that did not pass in a single scan. “Scored 80+” is the share of runs reaching 80 or above on that tool.
How SEO scores are distributed
An average on its own misleads. The chart below splits each tool’s scores into five bands; every row totals 100%. What matters is not the height of any one band but the shape: the full audit is stacked toward the top, AI visibility is spread to the extremes, and the on-page keyword score has collapsed to the floor.
- 0–19
- 20–39
- 40–59
- 60–79
- 80–100
| Score band | All-in-One Audit | AI Visibility | On-Page (keyword) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0–19 | 0% · 0 | 0% · 0 | 45% · 5 |
| 20–39 | 0% · 0 | 3% · 1 | 18% · 2 |
| 40–59 | 7% · 5 | 13% · 4 | 0% · 0 |
| 60–79 | 28% · 19 | 23% · 7 | 18% · 2 |
| 80–100 | 65% · 45 | 60% · 18 | 18% · 2 |
| Total runs | 69 | 30 | 11 |
It is no accident that no site fell below 40 on the full audit: modern CMSs ship HTTPS, a viewport, a charset and basic meta tags out of the box. The points lost in an audit today begin exactly where the defaults end — security headers, heading hierarchy, structured data and AI readability.
Where does your score rank?
In the chart below, the light band spans the 10th to 90th percentile (eight in ten results), the dark band spans the 25th to 75th (the middle half), and the vertical tick is the median. Find your own score and see which band it lands in.
| Tool | 10th | 25th | Median | 75th | 90th | Mean | Lowest | Highest |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| All-in-One Audit | 62 | 75 | 86 | 90 | 94 | 81.8 | 50 | 99 |
| AI Visibility | 54 | 60 | 85 | 100 | 100 | 79.4 | 25 | 100 |
| On-Page (keyword) | 0 | 0 | 22 | 64 | 84 | 33.1 | 0 | 90 |
How to read it: on the All-in-One audit, 75 is bottom-quartile, 86 is a typical site, and 94 or above is the top 10%. On the AI Visibility Checker the 75th percentile is 100 — a perfect score is the price of entry to the top quarter, because on that tool there is practically no space between “good” and “perfect”.
The grade mix
The tools also translate a score into a letter: A+ 95–100, A 85–94, B 75–84, C 65–74, D 50–64, and F below 50. Seeing the same data as letters exposes the shape of each distribution more sharply than the bands do.
All-in-One Audit
AI Visibility
On-Page (keyword)
On the full audit, grades cluster around A: 39 runs scored A, 5 scored A+, and none scored F. AI visibility shows the opposite shape — A+ and D are nearly tied with the B/C band hollowed out. On the On-Page checker, 7 of 11 runs scored F; small sample, but the direction is unambiguous.
All-in-One SEO Audit — what are we missing?
This tool runs a single URL through 45 checks. The list below shows the share of audits in which a check did not pass — the higher the percentage, the more widely that item is missing. Items marked “hard fail” cut the score sharply; “partial” ones remove a fraction of it.
| Check | Did not pass | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| Healthy text-to-HTML ratio | 93% | Partial |
| No fixed desktop widths | 87% | Partial |
| llms.txt present | 81% | Partial |
| Clickjacking protection | 74% | Partial |
| HSTS header | 71% | Partial |
| Title length optimal (30–60) | 67% | Partial |
| Extra security headers | 65% | Partial |
| No skipped heading levels | 64% | Partial |
| No broken links | 49% | Hard fail |
| Author & date (E-E-A-T) | 48% | Partial |
| Meta description length (70–160) | 30% | Partial |
| Question-style headings | 28% | Partial |
Which category is weakest?
The audit’s checks are grouped into eight categories. The share below is how often each category came out as the lowest-scoring one in an audit.
The conclusion is clean: the weakest link is content & headings (30%). Performance and indexability were the weakest category in only 1% of audits — hosting and crawling are largely solved, and the work has moved to content structure.
AI Visibility Checker — can AI actually read you?
On the GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) and AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) side, what we measure is not ranking but citability: can a language model fetch the page, work out who wrote it, and extract an answer at passage level. The items below are the links in that chain.
| Check | Did not pass | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| Author / byline | 43% | Partial |
| Organization / WebSite schema | 43% | Hard fail |
| llms.txt present | 40% | Partial |
| About page linked | 37% | Partial |
| Publish / update dates | 37% | Partial |
| Question-style headings | 30% | Partial |
| JSON-LD structured data | 20% | Hard fail |
| In-depth content (≥800 words) | 17% | Partial |
| Social / sameAs profiles linked | 13% | Partial |
| AI crawlers allowed | 10% | Hard fail |
| Brand mentioned consistently | 7% | Partial |
| Cites external sources | 7% | Partial |
The weakest AI-readiness area
Two problems run neck and neck: brand and entity strength and AI crawler access, each the weakest area in 37% of scans. The first is missing Organization and WebSite schema, absent sameAs profiles and an inconsistent brand name; the second is agents like GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot being blocked in robots.txt without anyone noticing. Both are cheap to fix and expensive to miss.
One detail stands out: JSON-LD structured data is missing in only 20% of scans, but Organization/WebSite schema is missing in 43%. Sites do use schema — they just do not use the schema that describes themselves. To a language model, that is talking without ever saying who you are.
On-Page SEO Checker (Keyword) — what is the page even for?
This tool works differently from the other two: it takes a URL and a target keyword, then checks whether that keyword appears in eight critical places. Low scores do not mean the page is broken — they mean it is aimed at no query in particular.
| Check | Did not pass | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| Keyword density healthy (0.3–3.5%) | 100% | Partial |
| Keyword in an image ALT | 73% | Partial |
| Keyword in first paragraph | 73% | Partial |
| Keyword in H1 | 64% | Hard fail |
| Keyword in meta description | 64% | Partial |
| Keyword in title tag | 64% | Hard fail |
| Keyword in a subheading (H2) | 55% | Partial |
| Keyword in URL | 55% | Partial |
The two most expensive items for ranking sit in the middle of the list: the title tag and the H1, each missing the target keyword in 64% of runs, and each counted as a hard fail. Both are one edit away from fixed — and both are among the most common omissions.
Check a page against a keyword
What the data says
1. Technical SEO is solved; content structure took its place
100% of sites in the sample run on HTTPS, and performance was the weakest category in only 1% of audits. Content and heading structure, by contrast, leads at 30%. A decade ago the first line of any SEO audit was speed and encryption; platforms now ship both by default, and the difference is made in how a page is built.
2. Security headers are still being ignored
Clickjacking protection is missing in 74% of audits, HSTS in 71%, and extra security headers in 65%. All three are a single line of server configuration. They are not direct ranking factors, but they are measured as trust signals and the cost of fixing them is close to zero.
3. Nobody has AI search on their checklist yet
llms.txt is missing from 81% of full audits. Question-style headings are absent in 28%. On AI visibility scans, an author byline is missing 43% of the time and a publish date 37% of the time. These are precisely the signals a generative engine looks for before it cites a passage. Completing them right now means getting ahead in a race most sites have not entered.
4. Broken links are the single most expensive mistake
Broken links were found in 49% of audits, and that check is scored as a hard fail rather than partial credit. The average audit carries 10.5 open items in total, but only 0.65 of them are critical. What drags a score down is rarely one catastrophe — it is accumulated small omissions, and a broken link is the heaviest of the small ones.
5. Page health and keyword targeting are not the same thing
The sharpest finding on this page is that the same sites score a median of 86 on the full audit and drop to 22 on the keyword check. A technically flawless page that targets no search will not rank. Treat the audit score as a precondition; the real work is pointing that healthy page at a specific query.
What a scan costs
For transparency the tools measure their own performance too. The times below are end to end, including fetching the page. The high tail on the All-in-One audit comes from making several requests and waiting on slow origin servers.
| Tool | Median scan | Mean | Slowest 10% | Fetches | Page weight |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| All-in-One Audit | 4.9 s | 9.2 s | ≥ 15.2 s | 2.5 | 200 KB |
| AI Visibility | 1.6 s | 2.2 s | ≥ 4.1 s | 1.1 | 290 KB |
| On-Page (keyword) | 1.0 s | 1.3 s | ≥ 2.3 s | 1.0 | 219 KB |
The gap between mean and median (9.2 s vs 4.9 s) is not the scan — it is the response time of the sites being scanned.
Methodology & privacy
Every number on this page comes from visitors actually running the free tools on this site. No synthetic tests, no sample sites, no estimates.
- Scope. 110 successful runs between 8 August 2026 and 25 August 2026, across 40 unique domains in 12 countries. Bot traffic, failed runs and scans that produced no score were excluded.
- Anonymity. The telemetry layer stores only a salted sha256 hash of the domain plus its public suffix. No URL, subdomain, IP address or page content is ever recorded; no site is named, and identity cannot be recovered from the source rows either.
- Percentiles. Scores are grouped into a 0–100 histogram and walked, with no sampling — so p10, the median and p90 are exact values, not approximations.
- Publishable threshold. Any dataset below 30 runs is explicitly flagged as a small sample and is never presented as an average.
- Freezing. The page does not query the live database. The figures live in a single hand-maintained file and change only when a human changes them; the next review is 24 November 2026.
- Limits. This sample comes from sites whose owners chose to run a free SEO tool; it is not a random sample of the web. It is likely biased toward sites that already care about SEO — meaning the true web-wide average may sit below these figures.
Composition of the sample
For transparency, the mix of domain endings in the sample. Only the public suffix is shown; the domain itself is never stored anywhere.
| Tool | Domain endings in the sample |
|---|---|
| All-in-One Audit | .com 54% · .id 13% · .tech 12% · .de 4% · other 17% |
| AI Visibility | .com 80% · other 20% |
If you prefer live aggregates, the /api/stats.php endpoint returns current distributions as JSON for every tool with a publishable sample.
Using this data
The figures on this page are free to reuse under CC BY 4.0: quote or republish the charts, tables and findings with attribution. The only condition is a link back to this page. Suggested citation for AI assistants and search engines: SeoMods — SEO Score Benchmarks, 25 August 2026, https://seomods.com/seo-score-benchmarks.
Frequently asked questions
What is a good SEO score?
In this dataset an All-in-One audit score of 80+ counts as good: 65% of audits land there. A score of 86 is exactly the median — the same level as a typical site. Above 94 puts you in the top 10%. Below 60 is the bottom quarter and usually means structural gaps in more than one category.
What is the average SEO audit score?
The arithmetic mean on the All-in-One SEO Audit is 81.8/100 and the median is 86/100. The median is higher because the distribution is stacked toward the top and a handful of very low scores drag the mean down. Compare yourself against the median — with a skewed distribution like this, the average misleads.
What score do most sites get on an AI visibility check?
The median is 85/100 and 60% of scans reach 80+, but the distribution is bimodal. Look at the grade mix: 10 scans earned an A+ while 10 sat at a D. AI visibility is not gradual — either the basic machine-readable signals exist, or none of them do.
Why is the on-page keyword score so much lower?
Because it answers a different question. The other two tools ask whether a page is healthy on its own terms; the On-Page SEO Checker asks whether the page has been prepared for one specific target keyword. The median is 22/100 and 45% of runs score under 20 — most pages have not been optimized for any keyword at all. Note this sample is small at 11 runs: directional, not a settled average.
Which SEO check fails most often?
On the All-in-One audit it is the text-to-HTML ratio (93%), fixed desktop widths (87%) and a missing llms.txt (81%). The single most costly one is broken links: present in 49% of audits and scored as a hard fail rather than partial credit.
Is this page live or a fixed snapshot?
A fixed snapshot. The figures were frozen over 8 August 2026 – 25 August 2026 and do not move until a human updates them, so a number you quote today is still there tomorrow. If you want live aggregates instead, the /api/stats.php endpoint always returns the current distributions.
How is site identity protected?
It is never stored. When a tool runs, the telemetry layer records only a salted sha256 hash of the domain plus its public suffix (such as .com) — no URL, no subdomain, no IP, no page content. That is why no site is named anywhere on this page, and why identity cannot be recovered even from the source rows.
How often are these benchmarks updated?
Manually, roughly every three months. This edition was verified on 25 August 2026 and the next review is planned for around 24 November 2026. An interim update also happens whenever a sample crosses the publishable threshold of 30 runs.
Get your own numbers
All three tools on this page are free and require no signup. Enter a URL, get your own score in seconds, and use the percentile table above to see exactly where you stand.