What makes an issue critical
An issue is classified as critical when it directly blocks crawling, indexing, or ranking. Specific triggers by category: • Technical SEO — invalid or expired SSL certificate (when page fails to load over HTTPS), missing mobile viewport meta tag • Indexability — meta robots noindex tag on a page that should be indexed • On-Page SEO — missing title tag, missing H1, excessively bloated DOM (DOM nodes > threshold) • Links — more than 5 broken links on a single page • AI Readiness — ALL AI crawlers blocked simultaneously in robots.txt (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, CCBot, ChatGPT-User)
How to prioritise critical issues
Fix critical issues before anything else. Start with indexability blockers (noindex, broken canonical) because they prevent the page from appearing in search results at all. Then address technical issues (SSL, viewport meta) that affect crawlability across the site. A single critical issue deducts 20 points from its category. In a category with 15% weight (like Technical SEO), that alone reduces the overall score by 3 points.
Critical count — Total number of critical-severity findings across all categories.