No article, landing page or station page is approved on judgment alone. Every piece passes through the same two-gate audit and comes out with one grade, one list of defects, and a yes or no. Here is the mechanism.
The two gates ask different kinds of question. Gate 1 asks nine questions with factual answers — is there one H1, do the schema and the visible text match, is the pricing sourced. Gate 2 asks how good this is, and answers with a number. Facts come first, because a beautifully written page with invented statistics is not a near-miss. It is a liability.
These are facts, not opinions, so they are recorded as pass or fail with the exact location of the defect and what fixing it requires. Nothing here is scored, weighted, or traded off against anything else.
One blocker means NOT READY, at any grade, including A+. Quality cannot buy its way past a factual defect, so the two signals never get quietly averaged into “good enough”.
Content that clears Gate 1 is scored on five categories at fixed weights. The weighting is the editorial position made explicit: whether the page answers the reader's actual question is worth twice as much as how it sounds.
Six review lenses feed these five numbers rather than being scored separately — SEO, answer-engine readiness, editorial quality, engagement, brand and conversion.
The weights shift with the dominant content type before scoring, and the audit states what it moved. Pages close to conversion are weighted for local relevance, booking information and commercial clarity. Informational pages are weighted for depth and answer-readiness. Inspiration-led travel content gets an explicit exception: it is not penalised for being less machine-extractable when the reader experience is stronger for it — destination writing does not become an operations manual to please a snippet.
The format is fixed, which is what makes results comparable across writers, content types and months.
Detected, with any weight adjustment named.
Ready, or Not Ready.
One letter, one number out of 100.
What, where exactly, and what fixing it takes.
All five, at their weights.
What the piece does well, so it gets repeated.
High, medium and polish — each cited to a section.
Publish or revise, with the reasoning.
The audit mechanism and rubric structure I designed and operate. Weights, blockers, grade bands and output format are shown; the scoring guidance behind each category is not published.
The rubric grades a draft against a defined standard. It does not measure published performance — that is what the case-study evidence is for. Rubric v2.0, described as operated in August 2026.