Search Overflow
ShippedGaps carry a reason and a remedy

Gap reporting

The most dangerous audit result is a green tick nobody earned. An absence should never read as a finding.

Not checked is a distinct result

A check that could not run because you have not connected Search Console reports a gap naming Search Console. It does not report that your rankings are fine.

Unconnected profiles are gaps, not failures

If you have not connected a Google Business Profile, we do not tell you your profile is incomplete. We tell you we could not look.

Every gap names the thing that would close it

A gap that only says unknown is barely better than a false pass, because it gives you nothing to act on. Each one carries the specific blocker, whether that is a connection you have not made, a data set we do not license, or a page our crawler was refused. You should never have to guess why a row is empty.

Gaps are excluded from scoring in both directions

A gap does not lower your score and does not raise it. Counting it against you would punish you for our missing access, and counting it for you would be the green tick this exists to prevent. The score reports only what was actually measured, and the gap count sits beside it so you can see how much of the picture is missing.

Why the crawler refusing a page is itself reported

When a page cannot be fetched, some tools drop it from the run and report on what remains, which quietly shrinks the denominator and inflates the result. A refused page is reported as a refused page. The audit tells you it looked at forty of your fifty pages rather than implying it looked at all of them.

Questions

Do gaps count against my score?

No. A gap is missing information, not a defect. Scoring them would punish you for what we could not see.

More in Never ship a bad claim

Run it against your own site.

No signup, no card. It reports what it could not check as well as what it found.