Glossary
The BOOSTD Growth Score: what the number is made of, and what it is not
The Growth Score is BOOSTD’s 0 to 100 summary of how well placed a business is to grow through search, AI answers, local presence, trust and conversion. The eleven categories, how they are weighted by business model, how the overall number is calculated, and the rules it keeps.
Want to know where your own site stands? Run a free Growth Scan
What the Growth Score is
The Growth Score is a single number from 0 to 100 summarising how well placed a business is to grow through search, AI answers, local presence, trust and conversion. It exists so a business can see its position at a glance without losing the evidence underneath: every overall score opens into category scores, and every category into the checks behind it.
It is built from up to eleven categories. They are weighted according to the kind of business being scored, and a category counts only if it applies to that business and there is enough evidence to score it.
The eleven categories
- Search Visibility: ranking coverage, impressions and clicks, and how many queries you appear for.
- Technical SEO: indexability, crawl health, canonicals, redirects, broken links, structured data and speed.
- Content Coverage: whether priority topics are covered, match intent, and are kept fresh.
- AI / LLM Visibility: mentions and citations across a sampled set of AI answers.
- Local Presence: listing completeness, map visibility, citations and NAP consistency.
- Authority / Backlinks: relevant referring sites, mentions and link quality against competitors.
- E-E-A-T / Trust: authors, company transparency, sourcing, contact and legal pages, consistent identity.
- Conversion Readiness: calls to action, forms, mobile flow, tracking and friction.
- Website Experience / Performance: Core Web Vitals, accessibility, responsiveness and errors.
- Reputation / Reviews: rating, volume, recency, sentiment and response rate.
- Competitive Position: visibility relative to competitors in your priority markets and topics.
Weights change with the kind of business
A plumber and a software company should not be judged on the same mix. These are the published weights for three business models in methodology version 1. They are a starting judgement, not a model fitted to outcome data.
| Dimension | Local service | Ecommerce | SaaS |
|---|---|---|---|
| Search Visibility | 15 | 20 | 18 |
| Technical SEO | 10 | 16 | 10 |
| Content Coverage | 8 | 14 | 18 |
| AI / LLM Visibility | 7 | 7 | 14 |
| Local Presence | 20 | 0 | 0 |
| Authority / Backlinks | 7 | 10 | 14 |
| E-E-A-T / Trust | 8 | 8 | 10 |
| Conversion Readiness | 10 | 16 | 14 |
| Website Experience / Performance | 5 | 10 | 6 |
| Reputation / Reviews | 15 | 8 | 4 |
| Competitive Position | 5 | 6 | 8 |
How the overall number is calculated
Each applicable category score is multiplied by its weight, the results are added up, and the total is divided by the sum of the weights that were used. A weight of zero, such as local presence for an online-only store, means the category plays no part.
A category that does not apply, or has fewer than two observed checks behind it, is left out of both sides of that division. It is not counted as zero. This is the difference between "we could not measure this" and "this is bad", and a score that confuses the two punishes businesses for gaps in the tool.
Every stored score records the methodology version, the weights used, when each source was read, which categories were judged not applicable, and the raw measurements. That is what keeps a before-and-after comparison fair when the methodology changes.
Current score and potential score
Alongside the current score, BOOSTD can show a potential score: what the current score would become if the fixes it has identified were completed. Each modelled improvement is discounted by how likely it is to work, and no improvement is ever treated as more than 85% likely.
A potential score is a modelled opportunity. It is not a forecast of rankings, traffic or revenue, and it is never presented as one.
The rules the score keeps
The score will
- State the methodology version it was calculated under.
- Show which categories were not measured, and why.
- Keep the weights it used, so any score can be recalculated and checked.
- Version any change to the method and note it, rather than rewriting history.
The score will not
- Change with the plan a business pays for. Plan tier is not part of the methodology.
- Count a category it could not measure as zero.
- Present the potential score as a promise.
- Manufacture an improvement by quietly changing how it is calculated.
Get an indicative score for your own site
The Free Growth Scan scores the five categories it can measure from your public pages, and lists the six it cannot, with the reason for each. No sign-up.
Last updated · Published by Zubair Afzal (responsible editor), on owner authorisation