Most technical SEO tools compress a dozen checks (crawlability, page speed, structured data, mobile usability) into one headline score. It is a useful format. It also creates an incentive to always produce a number, even when the underlying check failed or timed out.
The Incentive Problem With Always-On Scores
Users reward green dashboards. Vendors know that. When a sub-check times out, the easy product choice is to drop it from the average or backfill a neutral estimate so the headline number still paints. That teaches teams to trust a fiction.
What Farovane Checks
Farovane's Site Health Score is built from real sub-checks run against your live site. The point of the rollup is prioritization, not theater. Each sub-check should stand on evidence gathered in that run.
Failure Modes We Surface
When a check fails because an API call timed out, a page was unreachable, or a credential was missing, that sub-score is reported as unavailable with the actual failure reason. It is not silently averaged away. The headline score is allowed to look incomplete when the data is incomplete.
How to Read Unavailable
Treat unavailable as "do not decide yet," not as a pass.
Fix connectivity, auth, or crawl blockers that caused the failure.
Re-run before you celebrate a recovered number.
Prefer a short list of real failures over a smooth score you cannot explain.
Trust as a Product Feature
The same honesty rule shows up in AI visibility: engines you have not queried are "not connected," not estimated. Rank tracking should explain movers when we have context, not invent a story when we do not.
If you want a scoreboard that is allowed to say "we don't know yet," start free and judge the empty states as carefully as the green ones.
Related: About Farovane; Rank Tracking Still Matters.