We Audited Our Own Site With HellSEO — Here's What We Found

What did the overall scorecard look like?

Lighthouse scored Performance 91, Accessibility 100, Best Practices 100, and SEO 100. Across HellSEO's own three-axis audit, the breakdown was:

Why did the SEO axis lose points?

Indexability, title tag, heading structure, HTTPS/sitemap, and meta description all passed cleanly. The one WARN was Core Web Vitals & Performance: Largest Contentful Paint measured 3.5 seconds against a 2.5-second pass threshold, worth 7.5 of a possible 15 points. Cumulative Layout Shift was a clean 0 and Total Blocking Time was 20ms — the LCP number alone was what kept this item from a full pass.

How did AEO score a perfect 100?

All six AEO checks passed: a 16-word AI-citable opening paragraph, 9 of 9 H2 sections opening with a direct answer, an FAQ block with FAQPage schema present and complete, 11 content lists, and 8 of 20 H2/H3 headings phrased as questions — comfortably above the 30% threshold.

What actually failed, and why?

Backlink Authority scored 0 of 15 points, the only outright fail on the report. The reason stated in the audit itself: "Not in the open web graph yet — no meaningful inbound links detected." Every other GEO check passed — AI crawler access, AI-readable server-rendered content, structured citable Organization schema, 2 sameAs entity profiles, and all three trust pages (About, Contact, Privacy) linked.

• AI Crawler & Access Controls — pass, no AI crawler blocked in robots.txt
• AI-Readable Content — pass, 1,963 words readable in the raw server-rendered HTML
• Structured Citable Content — pass, complete Organization schema
• Backlink Authority — fail, 0/15, no meaningful inbound links yet
• Entity Connection (sameAs) — pass, 2 profiles linked
• Trust Pages — pass, About, Contact, and Privacy Policy all linked

Did the score move, or is this just one lucky snapshot?

We didn't just run this once. Over roughly 90 minutes on September 27–28, 2026, we re-ran the audit six times as we shipped fixes — and every one of those runs is still sitting in our own database, unedited:

GEO climbed from 70 to 85 as we added sameAs entity links and trust-page links; AEO went from 93 to a flat 100 once every FAQ question landed in a real heading tag. SEO's zig-zag between 85 and 100 isn't a real regression — it tracks Lighthouse's run-to-run Largest Contentful Paint variance (the dashed Performance line moves in the same pattern), not anything we changed about indexability or tags.

What's the takeaway from running this on yourself?

Twenty-three of twenty-four checks passing is a reasonable bar for a small, actively-maintained site — and the one failure has no code fix, which is exactly the point made in why backlink authority won't budge from a schema tag. The LCP warning is the more actionable item, and it's the next thing on the list to fix.

Run the same 24-check audit against your own site at HellSEO to see where you actually stand, warts included.