FAQ
Everything we get asked.
Your browser and its developer tools — Inspect, Network, Console, View Source. Nothing else. The test site blocks all crawlers, audit suites, and AI agents at the network level: Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, Ahrefs Site Audit, Semrush, GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and the rest are denied. The point of the credential is to measure whether you can audit, not whether you can run a tool over a site.
By design — to prevent AI-assisted cheating. If we let people pipe the test site through GPTBot or run a Sitebulb audit and paste the report in, the credential would measure tool ownership, not auditing skill. Blocking automation is what makes the result meaningful.
Each finding has to map unambiguously to a specific entry on a private master answer key. Generic claims ("the metadata could be better") match nothing. The grader is conservative — high and medium confidence matches count, low does not. Combined with the manual-only constraint on the test site, scoring measures specific, evidence-backed observations of an SEO who actually opened the page.
Submissions are graded against the master answer key by an AI grader using a published rubric. Each of your findings is matched to a master-list entry at high, medium, or low confidence; your score is the count of unique high- and medium-confidence matches. Tier follows from the score plus the kinds of patterns you caught. Full methodology: /methodology.
Consistency. A panel of human graders drift over time and across reviewers; an AI grader applied to a fixed master key returns the same answer for the same submission. The master key is curated and revised by humans. The grader executes it.
1–2 hours for Apprentice, 2–3 hours for Practitioner, 3–5 hours for Specialist, 5–8 hours for Guru. Manual auditing takes longer than running a crawler — that's part of the point.
Seconds. Submit your findings via the form on /submit and the scorecard returns inline. No waiting list, no review queue.
Yes. Every credential has a verifiable badge URL at /badge/[code]. If you opt into the public registry, employers can also look you up by name at /verify. If you keep your record private, the badge URL is the only way to share it — direct it to the employer yourself.
Yes. By default you control whether your record appears in the public registry. You always have a verifiable badge URL — share it with employers directly without ever appearing on the public page.
Yes — there's a 24-hour cooldown between attempts. Most people who retake go up at least one tier on their second pass.
Not until 12 months after a candidate has submitted, and not in full. The credential is designed to test live audit skill, not memorisation.
No — only the count by tier. Listing every miss would convert each scorecard into a study guide and devalue the credential for everyone else. We tell you how much headroom there is, not what's in it.
Two ways. Verify candidates' existing tiers at /verify and use the published rubric to map tier to seniority. Or run candidates through the test directly with the hiring kit — anonymous candidate links, a private dashboard, and a scoring rubric scaled to seniority. See /for-companies.
Yes — taking the test, earning a tier, and being listed in the registry costs nothing. We don't sell candidate data, run third-party advertising, or upsell premium features. The registry operates as a public-good infrastructure for the SEO community.
Still got questions?
Sign up anyway — you can email us at any point during the audit and we'll answer in 24 hours.