What does your website show the public?

The check looks only at information that is already public, and only at your website: whether it serves over HTTPS, whether http and www land in one place, how fast the first byte arrives, how heavy the page is, whether it works on a phone, whether a visitor can find a way to contact you, what a shared link looks like, and what robots.txt, the sitemap and the structured data tell a machine. Sixteen signals in four groups.

It reports two numbers: a Public Signal Score, from the signals it could observe, and Evidence Coverage, how much of the picture those signals actually represent. A high score at low coverage means the visible parts look good, not that the business is digitally fit. The whole rubric — every signal and its weight — is published at how the Public Signal Score works.

Anything that cannot be seen from outside (your backups, your accounts, whether an enquiry is answered) is marked as not publicly observable. It never counts for or against the score.

A Verified Digital Fitness Score requires evidence you provide, a human review and tests that are separately agreed with you. That is where the "not publicly observable" items are examined properly.

Two things this check deliberately leaves alone, because they are not about your website. Whether the domain is protected — expiry, transfer lock, DNSSEC, nameservers — belongs to Domain Health. Whether someone can send mail claiming to be you belongs to the Email Health. Until 3 September 2026 this page scored all three at once and returned one number for them, which made a good website with an unprotected domain and a good domain with a slow website look the same. Each tool now answers one question, and the result here links to the other two with your domain already filled in.