Understanding your Report Card

Every article carries a Report Card: an Overall score, three quality dials, and, if your plan includes compliance packs, a separate compliance readout.

The single most important thing to know: these scores are calculated, not judged. Verand runs a suite of 46 deterministic checks against your article and adds up the results. No model decides whether your article is good. The same article always produces the same score, and every point is traceable to a specific check you can open and read.

📸 Screenshot slot: report-card-full.png
The Report Card on a real article scoring somewhere in the 80s: good enough to look healthy, imperfect enough to show items in the fix list.

The three dials

GEO is the one people ask about. It stands for Generative Engine Optimisation. Traditional SEO gets you ranked in a list of links; GEO is about being the source an AI assistant quotes when someone asks a question. Different mechanics (quotable passages, clean definitions, explicit answers), so it's scored separately.

Each dial is scored 0–100 and built from its own group of checks: 21 for SEO, 7 for GEO, 5 for E-E-A-T.

How Overall is calculated

Overall is a weighted blend of the three dials, not a simple average. For a YMYL site the default weighting is:

• SEO: 45%
• E-E-A-T: 35%
• GEO: 20%

E-E-A-T carries far more weight than it would for a general blog, because for a regulated or high-trust business, demonstrable expertise is the thing that actually matters.

If a dial hasn't been scored, because the checks it depends on haven't run, it's excluded and the remaining weights are rebalanced, rather than the missing dial dragging your score down.

The publish floors

There are two thresholds, and they behave as a floor, not a target:

• Overall must reach 80
• Every scored dial must reach 70

Clear both and the article is ready to publish.

Fall below either one and Verand asks you to record a reason before publishing. It doesn't stop you. You're the editor, and sometimes you have a good reason. It asks you to say what it is, and logs it.

Warnings above the floor don't block anything. If your article scores 93 and still shows six suggestions, those are a polish list, not an obstacle. This is worth knowing because an article can look busy with recommendations and still be perfectly publishable.

The floors are the same on every plan. What varies by plan is which dials and gates are present, not how high the bar is.

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An article below the floor, showing the override prompt asking for a reason.

Every score item is a fix

The Report Card isn't a grading exercise: each item is an entry point. Open a failing or warning check and you get:

• What it checks and the target it's measuring against
• Why it matters, in one line
• A one-click fix where one is possible

Apply a fix and Verand re-runs the checks, so the score you see afterwards reflects the change rather than a stale number.

Two things that trip people up

An existing article can show stale scores. Verand's checks improve over time. An article validated weeks ago carries the results from back then until you re-validate it. If a score looks wrong or a check you expect is missing, hit Re-validate before assuming something's broken.

The compliance readout is not a score. It's a pass/blocked gate, deliberately kept out of the 0–100 numbers. A compliance problem isn't something you trade off against a good SEO score. See the compliance gate page.