// Terms

Terms

Last updated 2026-07-22

The free Essentials audit is provided as-is. The score it produces is informational, meaning it reflects what the audit's 13 check groups and 56 checked points found at the moment the URL was scanned. It is not a guarantee of any outcome: not a search ranking, not a citation rate, not a conversion lift, not an AI model's likelihood of referencing your site. The score is a snapshot of machine-readable signals, and the signals can change between the scan and any action you take based on it.

What the audit does and does not cover

MachineRead does not warrant that the audit will catch every issue on your site. The free tier checks 56 points across 3 pillars (off-site presence, AI access and scrapability, SEO). However, 9 advanced rows are locked, meaning they are reported as zero-scored coverage gaps rather than guesses at the actual values. Due to this locked-row design, a low score in an advanced row does not mean the underlying signal is absent. It means the free audit did not verify it. As a result, acting on a locked row's zero score as if it were a confirmed failure would be a misreading of what the audit reports.

The audit does not constitute legal advice, SEO advice, or compliance advice. It is a technical scan of publicly visible machine-readable signals. If you need a legal opinion, an SEO strategy tailored to your competitive landscape, or a compliance audit for a regulated industry, the free audit is not a substitute for professional consultation.

Locked rows and deep-dives

The audit's locked rows are zero-scored coverage gaps. It is through these locked rows that the audit is honest about what it does not check. The 9 locked rows cover earned mentions and backlinks, social traction, AI citation share, extraction fidelity, agent task simulation, multi-engine index coverage, Core Web Vitals, and keyword competitor gaps. In other words, the free tier tells you these signals matter, tells you it does not measure them, and scores them as zero so the gap is visible rather than hidden.

The deep-dive blog posts linked from the launch page explain the methodology behind individual check groups. They are not a substitute for the methodology reference at /docs/methodology, which is the canonical and up-to-date source for how scoring works, what each pillar cap is, and how the locked-versus- unlocked distinction affects your total.

Your responsibility

You are responsible for how you act on the audit's findings. The audit reports what it found. It does not prescribe specific changes, does not guarantee that fixing a flagged issue will produce a measurable result, and does not track whether you followed up. The audit is a diagnostic tool (a snapshot of machine-readable signals at a point in time), and the decision to act on any finding is yours.

Service continuity

MachineRead may modify or discontinue the free audit at any time. The audit runs on infrastructure with a monthly cost ceiling under $20, which means the service is not backed by redundant hosting or guaranteed uptime. If the service is temporarily unavailable or permanently retired, there is no Service Level Agreement and no refund obligation, because the free tier has no payment to refund.

My recommendation: treat the audit as a starting point, not a final verdict. Run it, read the findings, cross-reference the methodology at /docs, and decide what to fix. The score is a signal, and signals are most useful when you understand the mechanism behind them.

Questions about these terms: [email protected]