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About
86 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 86 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.
What this is, in 200 words
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
Every factor is sorted into one of three tiers — Required, Recommended, or Variable — and graded pass, warn, or fail against a published rule. Sites failing any applicable Required factor have their quality score withheld until the gap is fixed. Above that, Recommended factors carry flat weight and Variable factors are weighted by site type (a SaaS marketing site is scored differently than an e-commerce store). Methodology versions are immutable: a weight change ships as a new version (method v1.2.0 is current) and historical scores stay attributable to the version under which they were computed.
The full rule for each of the 86 factors is published on the methodology page, alongside the data source we query and the threshold that produces a pass, warn, or fail. 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 methodology page documents every rule and is versioned so 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.