Deep Scan in Greadme: 190+ Parameter Website Audit

The Six Categories Deep Scan Audits

Every Deep Scan produces an individual score for each category plus an aggregate total. Schema Markup is excluded from the total because it is optional and not relevant to every page.

1. Performance

Performance measures how quickly the page renders and becomes usable. Deep Scan reports the full Core Web Vitals set:

• First Contentful Paint (FCP): when the first piece of content appears
• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): when the largest visible element finishes rendering
• Total Blocking Time (TBT): how long the main thread is blocked by long tasks
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): how much the layout shifts unexpectedly
• Speed Index: how quickly content is visibly populated
• Time to Interactive (TTI): when the page becomes fully interactive

Beyond headline metrics, the scan flags render-blocking resources, unminified JS/CSS, unused code, unoptimized images, and missing text compression.

2. SEO

The SEO category checks the technical fundamentals that determine whether search engines can crawl, understand, and index your page.

• Title tag presence, length, and relevance
• Meta description quality
• Heading hierarchy (H1–H6)
• Crawlability and indexability signals
• Canonical and hreflang configuration
• Mobile-friendliness and responsive design
• HTTP status codes and redirect chains

3. Accessibility

Accessibility is evaluated against WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines):

• Image alt text presence and quality
• Color contrast between text and background
• Keyboard navigability and focus management
• ARIA attribute correctness
• Form label associations
• Heading hierarchy and document structure
• Link text descriptiveness

4. Best Practices

Best Practices covers modern web standards and reliability:

• HTTPS usage
• Avoidance of deprecated APIs
• Correct HTTP/2 implementation
• Console error detection
• Valid HTML doctype
• Modern font formats (WOFF2)
• Proper charset (UTF-8)
• Third-party cookie avoidance

5. Security

Security audits check whether your site sends the browser-level headers and policies that protect users from common web attacks:

• HSTS: forces HTTPS connections and prevents SSL stripping attacks
• Content Security Policy (CSP): blocks cross-site scripting (XSS) at the browser level
• Clickjacking protection: prevents your pages from being embedded in malicious iframes
• Cross-origin isolation: protects against Spectre-style memory attacks
• Trusted Types: prevents DOM-based XSS by locking down dangerous DOM sinks

6. Meta Tags

Meta tags control how your page appears in search, social shares, and browser tabs. Deep Scan evaluates:

• Title tag: present, well-formed, within recommended length
• Meta description: present and descriptive
• Canonical tag: configured to avoid duplication
• Viewport tag: configured for mobile rendering
• Robots tag: indexing directives correct
• Charset tag: encoding declared
• Author, publisher, and creator tags: attribution in place

The scan also validates Open Graph (og:title, og:description, og:image, og:type, og:locale) and Twitter Card tags (twitter:card, twitter:title, twitter:description, twitter:image, twitter:site, twitter:creator). For a deeper dive, see our complete guide to meta tags.

7. Schema Markup

Schema markup helps search engines understand the meaning of your content and unlocks rich results — star ratings, FAQ dropdowns, product prices, event dates. Deep Scan validates schema against standards and checks rich-result eligibility per type. For implementation details, see our complete guide to structured data with schema.

The Scoring System

Deep Scan reports a per-category score and an aggregate total (excluding Schema Markup). Scores fall into three bands:

Reading Your Audit Results

Results are organized into expandable category sections. Each finding has a severity, a description, the affected elements, and a remediation step.

Severity Levels

• Errors: critical issues with significant impact on UX, accessibility, or search visibility — fix first.
• Warnings: noticeable impact, less urgent than errors — address after errors.
• Informational: best-practice suggestions that aren't causing direct problems.

What Each Finding Includes

• Title and description: what was checked and what the result means
• Affected elements: specific CSS selectors, HTML snippets, or URLs
• Impact assessment: how the issue affects your score and UX
• Remediation guidance: concrete steps to fix, often linking to deeper articles

Screenshot and Timeline

Deep Scan captures a final screenshot of the loaded page, plus a thumbnail timeline showing the visual loading progression — useful for understanding perceived performance.

AI-Powered Summary

When enabled, Greadme's AI analyzes the full scan output and generates a prioritized, plain-language summary covering:

• The most critical issues affecting the page
• A suggested order for tackling fixes based on impact
• Context about why some issues matter more than others
• Practical recommendations tailored to the specific results

Desktop vs. Mobile Analysis

Deep Scan lets you choose desktop or mobile, and the choice changes results meaningfully.

For pages you're actively optimizing, run both. Bottlenecks that are invisible on desktop (large images, heavy JS bundles) often become critical on mobile.

Exporting and Sharing Results

• Export to Excel: download a comprehensive spreadsheet of findings — useful for dev backlogs.
• Generate shareable links: public links to scan results, viewable without a Greadme account.

Deep Scan vs. Crawl Scan: When to Use Which

Greadme offers two scanning approaches. For a full breakdown of the multi-page option, see our complete guide to Crawl Scan.

The ideal workflow: run a Crawl Scan to find which pages have issues across the whole site, then run Deep Scans on the pages that matter most — homepage, key landing pages, product pages, and anything Crawl Scan flagged.

Common Issues Deep Scan Uncovers

What Happens When a Scan Is Blocked

Some sites use firewalls, bot protection, or WAF systems that may block analysis requests. When this happens, Deep Scan detects the block and provides:

• A clear explanation that bot protection was detected
• The user-agent string to allowlist so Greadme can analyze the site
• Alternative options for proceeding with the analysis

If you control the site, allowlisting Greadme's bot is a one-time fix that enables complete analysis on every future scan.

FAQ

What's the difference between Deep Scan and Lighthouse?

Deep Scan uses Lighthouse data (via the Google PageSpeed Insights API) for performance measurement, then layers on Greadme-specific checks: full schema validation with rich-result eligibility, an explicit meta-tags audit including Open Graph and Twitter Cards, the heavy-CSR SEO penalty, severity-grouped findings, and an optional AI summary that prioritizes fixes.

Why is my mobile score lower than my desktop score?

Mobile analysis simulates a mid-tier device on a 4G connection, so FCP, LCP, TBT, and TTI typically come in higher than on desktop. Because Google uses mobile-first indexing, the mobile score is usually the one that matters more for SEO.

Why is Schema Markup excluded from the total score?

Schema is optional — not every page needs structured data. Penalizing a page that doesn't need it would be misleading. Schema is still scored and shown as its own category so you can see eligibility for rich results where it applies.

How long does a Deep Scan take?

Most scans complete within one to a few minutes. The route has a 5-minute upper bound to accommodate slow pages, heavy JavaScript, and the AI summary step. Long-running progress is reported live while the scan runs.

Why did my SEO score drop suddenly?

The most common cause is the heavy-CSR detector: if the page now relies on client-side rendering for primary content, Deep Scan applies up to a 70-point SEO penalty. Other frequent causes are a new noindex directive, a broken canonical, or removed meta tags.

What does the AI summary actually do?

It reads the full scan output and produces a prioritized, plain-language plan: which findings matter most, why, and a suggested order to fix them. It's most useful on pages with many findings where the next step isn't obvious. Usage is plan-limited.

Can I scan a page that's behind authentication?

No — Deep Scan analyzes publicly accessible URLs. If your page is behind a login or a WAF that blocks bots, Greadme will detect the block and surface the user-agent string you can allowlist for future scans.

How often should I re-scan a page?

Re-scan after every meaningful change (new build, content update, performance work, schema changes). For pages you're actively optimizing, weekly or bi-weekly scans are reasonable. Stable pages can be re-scanned monthly to catch regressions.