How to Read a Deep Audit Report: All 9 Sections Explained
A Deep Audit returns a lot more than a number. One call gives you an LAI score, three sub-scores, nine section scores, a coverage figure, and a ranked list of findings pulled from 14,000+ individual checks. If you've never read one, the output can look dense. This guide walks through every part so you can go from "here's a report" to "here's what I'm fixing first" in about five minutes.
We'll use the real report from our personal-injury law case study as the worked example.
The headline: LAI score and confidence
LAI Score: 3.99/5 (good) confidence 67.41%
AI 4.1/5 SEO 2.96/5 Local n/a
- LAI score (0–5) is the overall grade. Bands: <2 poor, 2–3 fair, 3–4 good, 4+ excellent. Most real sites land 3–4 — "good, not great."
- Confidence reflects how much of the site the engine could evaluate on this run. Lower confidence usually means JS-heavy rendering or blocked resources, not that your site is bad.
- Sub-scores split the LAI into AI (answer-engine readiness), SEO (classic search), and Local (shown only when the site is a local business). The gap between AI and SEO is the single most useful signal — in our example, 4.1 on AI vs 2.96 on SEO immediately told us where the work was.
The nine sections
Each section is scored 0–5. This is your triage map — sort ascending and start at the bottom.
| # | Section | What it grades |
|---|---|---|
| S1 | Technical Foundation & Rendering | Does the page render, respond, and serve valid markup |
| S2 | Crawlability & Site Architecture | Can bots reach and understand your URL structure |
| S3 | Content Quality & Entity Semantics | Depth, clarity, and machine-readable meaning of content |
| S4 | Core Web Vitals & Performance | Load speed, layout stability, responsiveness |
| S5 | Technical SEO & Index Control | Canonicals, robots, sitemaps, indexation |
| S6 | Schema, Local, Trust & E-E-A-T | Structured data and trust signals |
| S7 | Security & Privacy | HTTPS, headers, privacy posture |
| S8 | Multimodal Content & Media | Image alt text, video markup, media SEO |
| S9 | Off-Site Signals & Reputation | External signals and reputation |
In the example, S6 (Schema/Trust) at 2.77 was the clear outlier — so that's where we started.
Coverage: how complete the run was
Tasks scored: 6027 (passed 2594, warned 1809)
Coverage: 41.9% (100/158 subsections, 125 AI checks run)
Coverage tells you what fraction of the possible checks actually ran. AI-powered checks only fire when the relevant content exists to evaluate, so a lower coverage number is normal and doesn't lower your score — it just means fewer checks applied to your page.
Findings: the actual to-do list
Findings are ranked by severity and tagged with a section + task ID + evidence:
[critical] S6 6.1.01: No Organization schema found
[critical] S2 2.7.02: Text to HTML ratio: 4%
The task ID (6.1.01) is stable, so you can map a fix directly to the check it clears and re-audit to confirm.
One important caveat: the engine weights some schema/local findings critical for types that may not apply to your business — Product schema on a law firm, Event on a SaaS tool. Filter those out first and focus on findings relevant to what your site actually is. Our schema-by-business-type checklist shows which types matter for each vertical.
Turning the report into a plan
- Read the AI/SEO gap — it tells you whether your problem is answer-engine readiness or classic search.
- Sort sections ascending — the two lowest are 80% of your ROI.
- Filter findings to what applies to your business model.
- Fix in task-ID order, re-audit, and watch the section score move.
That loop — audit, read, fix, re-audit — is exactly how we lifted our own homepage's schema section into the 4s. The report isn't a grade to feel bad about; it's a prioritized backlog.
Start reading your own reports. Subscribe to a plan — Pro ($39/mo) and Ultra ($99/mo) include unlimited Deep Audits, so you can audit, fix, and re-audit every site you own as often as you want. See plans and pricing →