Glossary

Your audit report uses technical terms from web performance, UX research, and content analysis. Here's what they all mean in plain language.

Audit Modules

AI Authenticity: This module analyzes sentence patterns, vocabulary choices, and writing style to identify markers commonly associated with AI-generated content. AI-sounding text can reduce trust and credibility with visitors.
AI SEO Readiness: Evaluates whether your content uses Schema markup, Q&A formatting, and semantic HTML that helps AI-powered search engines understand and surface your content in conversational results.
Brand Consistency: Compares color palettes across brand assets using perceptual color difference metrics (Delta E). Inconsistent branding reduces trust and makes your business look unprofessional.
Call-to-Action (CTA) Analysis: Identifies and evaluates call-to-action elements based on copy urgency, visual prominence, and placement. Weak CTAs are one of the most common reasons for low conversion rates.
Clarity & Jargon: Uses readability scores (like Flesch-Kincaid) and jargon detection to evaluate how accessible your content is to a general audience. Complex language increases bounce rates.
Cognitive Load: Combines visual clutter, information density, and layout complexity into a single score reflecting the mental effort required to process your page. Lower cognitive load means visitors can focus on what matters.
Color Palette: Extracts and displays the dominant colors found on your page for brand review.
Heuristic Audit: Tests your website against Nielsen's 10 usability heuristics and Shneiderman's eight golden rules — proven principles that predict how easy a site is to use.
Lexical Diversity: Uses advanced metrics (MATTR, MTLD, HD-D) that account for text length to measure vocabulary richness. Higher diversity keeps readers engaged and improves SEO.
Page Speed: Uses Google Lighthouse to measure Core Web Vitals and other performance metrics. Page speed directly impacts user experience, bounce rates, and search engine rankings.
Pricing Transparency: Detects psychological pricing tactics and evaluates how clearly pricing information is presented. Hidden or confusing pricing is one of the top reasons visitors abandon purchase decisions.
Semantic Coherence: Analyzes how well ideas connect logically using semantic similarity between adjacent sentences and paragraphs. Poor coherence means visitors get confused by disconnected or jumpy content.
Sentiment Analysis: Uses natural language processing to determine the emotional tone of your website copy. The right sentiment depends on context: consumer brands often benefit from positive tone, while B2B may prefer neutral or authoritative.
Syntactic Complexity: Analyzes grammatical dependencies between words to measure sentence complexity. Web users prefer short, simple sentences that can be quickly scanned.
Trust Signals: Scans your page for credibility indicators that help visitors trust your business: SSL certificates, privacy policies, testimonials, reviews, security badges, and visible contact information.
Value Proposition: Analyzes the balance between benefit-focused language and business jargon. A strong value proposition clearly communicates unique benefits with simple language and prominent placement.
Visual Attention (Saliency): Uses AI models to predict visual attention patterns, showing where users are most likely to look. This helps ensure your most important content (CTAs, value props) is in the visual hot spots.

Performance Metrics

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): CLS quantifies how much visible content moves around unexpectedly during page load. A score below 0.1 is considered good. High CLS causes users to accidentally click the wrong thing or lose their reading position.
DOM Size: DOM Size counts the total number of HTML elements on a page. A large DOM increases memory usage, makes style calculations slower, and can cause layout reflows. Under 1,500 elements is ideal.
First Contentful Paint (FCP): FCP marks the point when the browser renders the first piece of content from the DOM, giving the user visual feedback that the page is loading. Under 1.8 seconds is good. A fast FCP reassures users that something is happening.
First Input Delay (FID): FID captures the time from when a user first interacts with the page (e.g., clicking a link) to when the browser begins processing that interaction. Under 100ms is considered good. FID is being replaced by INP as the primary responsiveness metric.
Interaction to Next Paint (INP): INP measures the delay between a user interaction (click, tap, key press) and the next visual update on screen. Under 200ms feels instant. Slow INP makes your site feel laggy and unresponsive.
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): LCP measures the time from when a user starts loading the page until the largest image or text block is rendered within the viewport. A good LCP is under 2.5 seconds. It directly impacts how fast your site feels and affects search rankings.
Speed Index: Speed Index measures how quickly content is visually displayed during page load. It captures the overall perceived loading experience by looking at visual progress over time. Under 3.4 seconds is considered good.
Time to First Byte (TTFB): TTFB measures the time from when a user navigates to a URL until the first byte of data is received by the browser. It reflects server processing time and network latency. Under 600ms is good.
Total Blocking Time (TBT): TBT measures the total time between First Contentful Paint and Time to Interactive where the main thread was blocked long enough to prevent input responsiveness. Under 200ms is good. High TBT means the page feels sluggish.

Technical Concepts

Adjacent Coherence: How smoothly ideas flow from one paragraph to the next.
Cognitive Load Index: Combines multiple visual analysis factors into a single number representing the mental effort required to process a page. Lower is better — aim for pages that feel clean and focused rather than overwhelming.
Color Contrast: WCAG requires a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for large text (18px+ or 14px+ bold). Low contrast makes text hard to read, especially for people with low vision or in bright environments like outdoor mobile use.
Color Shift (ΔE): Delta E (ΔE) is a standard measure of perceptual color difference. A ΔE under 1 is imperceptible; under 3 is barely noticeable; over 5 is clearly different. Used here to check if your brand colors are being used consistently.
Error Prevention: Nielsen's fifth usability heuristic. Using HTML attributes like "required," "pattern," and "maxlength" catches input errors before submission. Inline validation that checks as the user types is even better — it prevents the frustration of submitting a form only to see errors.
Global Coherence: How well the overall message holds together across the entire page.
HD-D Score: HD-D (Hypergeometric Distribution D) estimates the probability that a randomly selected word from the text is a unique type. It is robust to text length differences. Higher scores indicate richer vocabulary.
Heading Hierarchy: Screen readers let users jump between headings to scan page structure. If you skip from H2 to H4, that navigation breaks. Headings should reflect content structure, not visual styling — use CSS for size instead of picking heading levels for their appearance.
MATTR Score: MATTR (Moving-Average Type-Token Ratio) calculates the ratio of unique words to total words using a sliding window, making it fair for texts of different lengths. Higher scores mean more varied vocabulary.
MTLD Score: MTLD measures the average length of text sequences that maintain a certain level of vocabulary diversity. Higher MTLD means the writer uses more varied words before repeating.
Reading Ease: Based on the Flesch-Kincaid readability formula, which considers sentence length and syllable count. A score of 60-70 is considered ideal for web content (understandable by 13-15 year olds). Higher scores mean easier reading.
Semantic Load: How much meaning and information the page tries to communicate at once.
System Feedback: Nielsen's first usability heuristic: "Visibility of System Status." When users click a button, they need confirmation the system received their action. Without feedback (spinners, progress bars, success messages), users assume the system is frozen and click again or leave.
User Control & Freedom: Nielsen's third usability heuristic. Every modal should have a close button, every multi-step form should have a back button, and every action should be undoable when possible. Without escape hatches, users feel trapped and abandon the page.
Visual Clutter: The amount of competing visual elements on the page — less clutter means easier focus.
Visual Complexity: How visually busy the page is — more elements, colors, and movement means higher complexity.
WCAG AA: WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) defines three levels: A (minimum), AA (recommended), and AAA (enhanced). Level AA covers the most impactful requirements including color contrast, keyboard navigation, text alternatives, and form labels. It is the legal standard in many jurisdictions.

Severity Levels

Critical: A serious issue that likely drives visitors away or prevents conversions. Fix first.
High: A significant issue that noticeably hurts user experience. Fix soon.
Low: A minor improvement opportunity — nice to fix but not urgent.
Medium: A moderate issue that could be improved for a better experience.

Score Bands

Critical (0–39): Significant problems that are likely hurting your business. Prioritize fixing these.
Good (70–100): This area of your site is performing well. Maintain it and focus efforts elsewhere.
Needs Attention (40–69): Room for improvement — addressing these issues will noticeably improve user experience.

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