A green tick means one of two things. Either the tool checked and the page passed, or the tool could not check and defaulted to pass. Most audit tools do not tell you which.
The default-to-pass problem
Plenty of SEO checks cannot be answered from a crawl alone. Whether your backlinks are toxic, whether your Google Business Profile is consistent with your site, whether a page actually ranks, none of that is visible in the HTML a crawler fetched. A tool that only crawls has three options when it hits one of these.
It can skip the check silently, which leaves you thinking it was covered. It can report a pass, which is a lie. Or it can say what it needs and why it could not answer.
The third option is the only honest one, and it is rare, because a dashboard full of amber "not established" states looks worse in a screenshot than a dashboard full of green.
An absence is not a finding
This is the rule that matters. If a check could not run, the output should record what was missing and what would resolve it. Not a pass. Not silence.
Search Overflow runs 73 SEO checks across five categories. Most of them run from a crawl alone. The rest state what they need rather than returning a tick they did not earn, so you can tell which findings are evidence and which are gaps.
Why this matters more with AI answers
When a person reads a wrong audit, they lose an afternoon. When a generative engine reads your site and forms a summary of your business from it, a false confidence in your own data compounds.
The same discipline applies to the claims you publish. If your site states a customer count, a percentage, or a superlative, something should be able to point at where that number came from. Two of the three competitors we researched were caught publishing numbers about themselves that contradicted their own other pages. Nobody set out to lie. The numbers just drifted, because nothing was checking.