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About
98 factors · method v1.2.0 · independent project · methodology open
Web Quality Index is a public registry. Every website on the open web has a score between 0 and 100, computed from 98 factors across security, performance, seo, ai-readiness, privacy, accessibility, brand presence, and email health. Methodology is published in full and versioned. Scores update within 24 hours of a fix, or instantly via on-demand rescan.
What this is
Most quality measurements live behind paid tools or proprietary algorithms. We think a public site’s technical, structural, and trust posture should be inspectable by anyone. WQI is the registry layer for that idea.
We measure each factor with deterministic checks against public signals: DNS records, HTTP responses, HTML structure, third-party APIs (Google PageSpeed, RDAP, Wayback Machine), and a few licensed datasets. The scoring formula is published. Everything we measure, we tell you how to fix — and we re-score when you do.
We don’t rank-bait. We don’t pay-to-promote. We don’t hide methodology behind enterprise pricing. The product is the data and the methodology that produces it.
How scoring works
The full rule for each of the 98 factors — tier (Required, Recommended, or Variable), data source, pass/warn/fail threshold, and the weight each factor carries by site type — is published in the standards directory and the knowledge base (open with the KB button in the header). Every score is independently reproducible from those rules; we hold no private signal that affects the result.
Independence and governance
Web Quality Index is operated as a public-benefit measurement project. Its mission: make the web safer, faster, and more trustworthy by giving any party — site owner, customer, journalist, regulator, vendor — an inspectable, free, and consistently-applied measurement of public-web quality.
No factor weight, threshold, or ranking position is influenced by any commercial relationship. WQI does not sell rankings, accept placement fees, take paid promotion, license preferential access, or modify scores in response to a payment. A site’s score is the same whether its owner has heard of us or not, and whether anyone selling services has heard of them or not.
How third parties use WQI
WQI scores and rankings are public data. Anyone — site owners, journalists, researchers, regulators, insurers, web-design agencies, cybersecurity consultancies — may reference WQI scores in their own work, including in commercial outreach to the sites or agencies we rank. We don’t require permission, charge a licence fee, or grant exclusivity. We also don’t endorse any consultancy or vendor that cites our data, and we have no “official” commercial partner.
If a consultancy contacts you citing your WQI score, two things are true: (1) the score is real and you can verify it yourself at the URL they sent, and (2) WQI didn’t recommend that consultancy, doesn’t take a cut, and doesn’t see who they reached. They are using public data, the same way anyone else can.
Disclosure
Some commercial consultancies that reference WQI scores share founders or investors with the project. Where that is the case, WQI’s measurement and ranking decisions remain governed independently: scoring rules, factor weights, and the published rankings are not adjustable by any commercial party, including affiliated ones. The knowledge base (KB in the header) documents every rule, and the WQI method version stamp at the bottom of every page lets historical scores remain attributable to the rule set in force when they were computed.
We publish corrections promptly when they’re warranted. If you believe a score is wrong, write corrections@webqualityindex.com with the domain and the factor. Corrections are evaluated against the published rule, not against the requester’s identity or relationship to us.