Who Grades Your Website Now?

Think about the last time you needed to hire somebody. A plumber, a lawyer, an advisor. You probably did not open five websites and compare them.

You asked. And something answered.

But that thing had to go read those websites first. So here is my question today. When it read yours, what did it find?

Hi! I am Bob Michaels, and this is Evolving the Web. Every two weeks I talk through the essays I just published, plainly, as one story. This time it is six of them, and they all come back to a single thing that happened in May that almost nobody noticed.

Chrome, the browser open on your desk right now, added a grade for your website. Not for how it looks. Not for how fast it loads. A grade for how well a piece of software can use it.

You run it yourself in about a minute. Most people who build websites for a living do not know it is there.

And here is what confused everybody. At the same time, the search side of Google kept saying, out loud, that none of this changes your ranking. Do not bother.

So which is it?

Both. And once you see why, this all gets simple.

Think about a restaurant. Two very different people show up.

One is the building inspector. Do the doors open. Are the exits marked. Is the kitchen wired right. The inspector does not care whether the food is good. Only whether the place works.

The other is the critic, who never looks at the wiring and decides whether anybody should go.

That is what happened here. The browser became the inspector. Search is still the critic, and the critic is telling you, correctly, that a new sign on the door will not make anyone praise your cooking.

They are both right. They are doing different jobs. And most companies argue about the critic while quietly failing the inspection.

So what gets inspected? I wrote my own version, fifteen checks in five groups, and published all of it so anyone can run it. Here are the five groups the way I would say them out loud.

Can it get in the building. Are you accidentally blocking the front door.

Can it read the room. Are your words in the page when it arrives, or do they get painted in a moment later. This one catches beautiful expensive websites, and it catches them hard. It is the heart of being machine readable.

Does the place say who it is. Your name, your address, your people. Written down the same way everywhere.

Does it answer a question. Any question. What you charge, who you are for, what happens next.

And does it have the new paperwork, which is the fashionable part everybody obsesses over and which I put last on purpose.

The fourth one is where I see the most damage.

What a buyer wants most is usually locked inside a document. The fee schedule is a PDF. The overview is a slide deck. Sometimes it is a photograph of a printed page, with the words baked into the picture.

It is a restaurant with the menu locked in a drawer. Anybody who walks in can ask a waiter. But nothing that reads your site can open that drawer, and increasingly nobody is walking in.

If a fact matters enough that people ask about it, put it on a page, in words. If you truly cannot publish a number, and plenty of regulated firms cannot, then publish how you charge instead. What it depends on. What moves it. That much is almost never against anybody's rules, and it is most of what somebody wanted anyway.

Because the alternative is not silence. Something answers the question anyway, using whatever it can find. Usually that is your competitor, who wrote it down.

One more piece of the inspection, and this one delighted me.

Part of what the browser checks was built twenty years ago for blind people. Under every web page is a structure that says what things are. This is a button. This button is called Search. It exists so a screen reader can describe the page to a person.

It turns out that is the only good description of your page anywhere. So when software arrives and tries to do something, that is what it reads.

Which means the accessibility work that companies have been putting off for a decade, the work that always lost the budget fight, just became the thing that decides whether a machine can use your site at all.

I want to be careful here. That is not why you should do accessibility work. You should do it because people cannot use your site. But if you have been losing that argument inside your company, you now have a second one, and I would use it.

Alright. Say you do all of it. Perfect score. Every door opens.

You still might never get recommended.

Passing the inspection does not make you the critic's pick. What a machine says about you comes mostly from what exists about you everywhere else. Coverage, listings, records, what other people have written. You control your own website completely. You control that other stuff barely at all.

So there are two measurements and you want both. One says software can read you. The other says software recommends you. The gap between them tells you where the work is. Readable and never mentioned? Rebuilding the website will not fix it. Mentioned everywhere and unreadable? Strangers are describing you and your own site cannot correct them, which is what a truth audit is for.

If you want that second one measured properly, against real competitors rather than in the abstract, that is the head to head read I do with most clients, and there are case studies on the site.

Let me finish with the thing I actually think is coming.

You can run the inspection today and get a number. Then you are stuck, because there is nowhere to look up what anyone else scored. Your number has nothing to sit beside.

That never lasts. Every time the web adopted a new measurement, somebody published a list. The list is partial, people argue, and the arguing produces the standard. Scoreboard first. Rules second. Every time.

So somebody is going to publish the first one of these. And whoever does gets to decide what the categories are.

I am building one. And you should know that I also sell the work that fixes a bad score, which is exactly the kind of thing a person ought to say out loud before handing you a number about your own company.

Until then, go run the check yourself. It takes a minute, it is already in your browser, and it is better to know.

That is the episode. Everything I mentioned is written up properly at bobmichaels dot ai, including the full scoring list, which is published rather than sold, on purpose.

I am Bob Michaels. I have been building the web since 1994, I take on consulting and fractional work, and I will see you in two weeks.