The order is the product.
Plenty of tools will score your site. The useful question was never what is wrong — it’s what do I do first. And that answer is a sequence, not a list.
Four gates, in order.
A gate seals when a critical or high check fails. Gates are sequential: one sealed gate holds everything after it shut, however good the later phases look on their own. These are the only phases that contribute to the readiness score.
Foundations
gateCan this site be found at all?
Reachable, HTTPS with a clean redirect, one canonical hostname, indexable, no crawl traps.
Skip it and: If a crawler can't reach it or is told not to index it, nothing downstream exists. This gate holds every other phase shut.
Identity
gateWill an impression become a click?
Unique titles and descriptions at renderable lengths, share cards, favicon, JSON-LD that parses.
Skip it and: A link shared with no title, description or image gets a fraction of the clicks. Launch day is almost entirely shared links.
Measurement
gateWill you learn anything from launch day?
Analytics firing, Search Console verified, Bing Webmaster Tools verified — checked by DNS too.
Skip it and: Launch traffic arrives once. Without measurement in place beforehand, you cannot tell what worked, so you cannot do it again.
Indexation
gateIs it actually in the index?
A sitemap that exists, parses, covers what we crawled, and doesn't list pages you've excluded.
Skip it and: A new site with no inbound links can wait months to be crawled. A submitted sitemap turns that into hours.
Then the part that actually gets traffic.
57 prescribed plays. A check detects a gap by crawling; a play is required by site type and can never be detected, because nothing about a page reveals whether you told your mailing list or claimed your map listing. That makes them unscoreable — scoring them would be scoring a guess — so they are gated instead. Around 31 apply to any one site, filtered by its type.
Authority
18 playsDoes anything point at it?
Curated directories and listings per site type. Short lists on purpose — mass submission is a spam signal.
Content
14 playsIs there a reason to link to it?
Cornerstone pages, internal linking, and the gap between what you publish and what people search.
Announcement
17 playsWho gets told, and in what order?
Product Hunt, Show HN, Reddit, X, LinkedIn, newsletter — sequenced, with copy drafted per channel.
Loop
8 playsDoes it keep compounding?
Weekly re-audit, indexation tracking, and a diff so regressions surface before they cost you.
What it will not do.
Blast 500 directories
Competitors advertise it as a feature. It is a spam signal that actively harms rankings, so the lists stay curated and short.
Invent facts
Generated schema never fabricates an address, phone number, price or review. Missing fields come back as explicit placeholders you have to fill in.
Claim certainty it doesn’t have
Some things can’t be seen from a crawl — DNS-based Search Console verification leaves no trace on the page, and a site rendered entirely in the browser returns an empty shell. Where that’s true, the report says so instead of guessing.