Trust
SEO has a credibility problem because the incentives are bad
Most of what is wrong with this industry is not malice — it is structure. Inspectors who profit from finding faults, scores nobody will explain, and work with no definition of done. Here is how we have tried to build those incentives out, and where we have not been able to.
Our commitments
Published criteria, always
All 45 checks, their weights, severities and pass criteria are public and readable without an account. If we inspect it, it is on the standard page.
Recomputable scores
The formula is published and the arithmetic is deterministic. You can recalculate any score we issue by hand. If ours disagrees with yours, that is a bug.
Stated limits
We publish what the inspection cannot assess — content quality, brand strength, strategy, competitor internals, future performance.
Labelled provenance
Every value is tagged measured, derived or declared. A lab estimate is never presented as a field measurement.
Free verification
Rechecks are free within 28 days. An inspector paid per re-inspection has a reason to fail you; we removed the reason.
Versioned standard
Revisions are logged with reasoning, including the ones where we were wrong. A result is always reproducible against the criteria in force that day.
What we refuse to do
These are not aspirations. They are constraints we have built into the product, and you should hold us to every one of them.
Guaranteed rankings or traffic
No provider can guarantee a ranking, because no provider controls the ranking system. Anyone who guarantees one is either lying or does not understand what they are selling. We will not do it in any form, including softened versions like "we guarantee first page or your money back".
Manufactured urgency
No countdown timers, no "your site is losing $X every day" calculators built on invented assumptions, no artificial scarcity on inspection slots. If a fault is urgent the severity says so, and the severity is published.
Proprietary toxicity scores
No third party can observe how a search engine values a link. Reporting a made-up number as though it were a measurement is the single most common dishonesty in SEO tooling. We report observable patterns — anchor distribution, velocity, network concentration — and let you judge.
Spammy backlink services
We will not sell, broker or match link-buying work. Any specialist offering it is removed from the platform. AU-01 exists to detect the damage this causes, and we are not going to sell the disease and the cure.
Vague monthly packages
No "SEO package" with undefined deliverables. Every job on this platform has a scope, acceptance criteria and a verification step defined before it starts.
Inspection-to-service upsell pressure
Scoring is deterministic and criteria are public, so we cannot mark you harder to sell you a fix. Every work order includes the full remedy steps so you can do it without us.
Our own conflicts of interest
Any inspection business that also sells remediation has a conflict. Pretending otherwise would be the first dishonest thing on this page. Here they are, and here is what structurally prevents each one from affecting your result.
We sell remediation as well as inspection
This is a genuine conflict and we manage it structurally rather than promising to be nice about it: scoring is deterministic from published weights, so no human at SEOWof can adjust a result. Every remedy is published in full so you can action it without paying us. Rechecks are free so we do not profit from your failure.
We take a fee from matched specialists
A 12% platform fee, disclosed on the platform, taken from the specialist rather than added to your price. We do not rank specialists by fee paid — the matching criteria are published on the specialists page.
We are not neutral about the standard
We wrote it. The weights are our judgement and we say so plainly rather than implying they are reverse-engineered fact. The mitigation is publication: you can read every criterion, disagree with any of it, and make a case for a change on the record.
Challenge a result
If you believe a check returned the wrong result, tell us with the evidence and we will re-run it manually. If the inspection was wrong we correct the report, reissue it, and log the fault against the standard. If a criterion itself is wrong, the change goes into the next version with the reasoning published.
We would rather be publicly corrected than quietly wrong. A standard nobody can argue with is not a standard, it is a marketing claim.