How the Silotree Score works
The Silotree Score is your site’s link structure as one number from 0 to 100. It is arithmetic over what the crawl found, so every point traces back to a count you can check. No model judges anything, and the whole formula is on this page.
Steps
Know the four parts and their weights
The score has four parts. Each is a share from 0 to 100, so a site of forty posts and one of forty thousand are measured the same way, and fixing a single post always moves the number. The weights add up to 100.
The four parts of the Silotree Score Part Weight What it measures Linked 40 How many of your posts the writing on your other pages links to Working links 20 How many of the links in your articles arrive where they point Reachable 20 How many posts a reader reaches within 3 clicks of your home page Organised 20 How many of your pages sit in a topic that has a page holding it together Linked carries the most because it is the part that tells sites apart. We set the weights on the crawls we had when the score was built (seven sites, October 2026). Reachable was close to 100 on most of them, because menus and archives put nearly every WordPress post within three clicks, and Working links was 100 on five of the seven. Linked ran from 6 to 90. With equal weight on Linked and Reachable, every site landed between 63 and 87; with Linked at 40, they spread from 37 to 85, which leaves room to see a site improve. We then checked the formula on the sites scanned in production (six, four of them big enough to score, totals 60 to 97) before publishing it. That is a small sample, and we will check again as more sites are scored.
See how each part is worked out
A post here is a page on your site that loaded, can appear in search, and isn’t an archive, a category listing or the home page. Pages marked noindex are left out: the site has already said they don’t count. Only links inside the writing count. A link in a menu, footer or sidebar reaches every page at once, so it can’t say anything about one post.
Linked
A post linked from the writing of 3 or more of your other pages counts in full. A post linked from one or two counts half: an edit to either of them can strand it. A post nothing links to counts nothing. Several links from the same page count once.
Linked = 100 × (posts linked from 3+ pages + half the posts linked from 1–2) ÷ all posts
Working links
Every link in your articles starts in good standing. Each one that doesn’t arrive cleanly costs a set number of points per hundred links, and the part never goes below 0.
What one link costs, per hundred links in your articles The link Cost Why Goes to a page that answers with an error (such as 404) or not at all 3 A dead end for the reader Goes through two or more redirects 2 Arrives, slowly Goes to a page marked noindex 1 Points at a page the site asks Google to skip Goes to a copy whose canonical names another address 1 Points at a page the site says is a duplicate Goes through one redirect 0.25 Nearly every site has some (moving to https alone makes one), so it costs a quarter Working links = 100 − 100 × (the costs added up) ÷ the links in your articles
Reachable
The share of posts a reader can reach in 3 clicks or fewer from your home page. Here every link counts, menus included, because this part is about the route a reader takes. A post only your sitemap knows about, with no clickable path at all, counts as out of reach.
Reachable = 100 × posts within 3 clicks ÷ all posts
Organised
Silotree groups your pages into topics by what they are about. Topics of fewer than four pages are too small to judge and are left out: being small isn’t a fault. Every other topic is judged by whether it has a hub, one page holding it together that the others link to.
- Counts in full: the topic has a hub, at least 35% of its pages’ links stay inside it, and no second topic covers the same ground in the same part of the site.
- Counts half: it has a hub, but it leaks (fewer than 35% of its links stay inside) or it competes with another topic. It has a structure, with something to tidy.
- Counts nothing: it has no hub at all.
Organised = 100 × (pages in a topic in full shape + half the pages in one that leaks or competes) ÷ pages in topics big enough to judge
See how the parts make the total
The total is the weighted average of the parts, rounded to a whole number. It is worked out from the exact part scores, not the rounded ones you see, so it is not four roundings added up. Beside each part the audit shows the points it cost: its weight times what it is short of 100. Fix all of that part and you win those points back.
Here is a made-up blog of 120 posts, scored by the same code that scores your site.
A worked example: 120 posts, Silotree Score 73 Part What the crawl found Part score Points it costs Linked 54 posts linked from 3+ pages, 30 from one or two, 36 from none 57.5 17 Working links 1,400 links: 6 broken, 3 through a chain, 60 through one redirect, 2 to a noindexed page (costs 41) 97.1 0.6 Reachable 111 of 120 posts within 3 clicks 92.5 1.5 Organised Of 90 pages in topics, 42 in one in full shape and 24 in one that leaks or competes 60 8 That makes 73. The orphan posts cost the most, so they are the place to start: giving each of the 36 one link would lift Linked to 72.5 and the total to 79.
Bands
- Strong: 90 or more
- Good: 75 to 89
- Needs work: 50 to 74
- Weak: under 50
A band is a name for the number. It makes no claim about rankings or traffic.
Know what the score leaves out
The score measures how your pages link to each other, and nothing else. On purpose, it leaves out:
- Link text and content gaps. Both are judgement calls. A score that took points for “click here” would teach people to stuff keywords into their links. Silotree still flags generic link text; it just doesn’t score it.
- Everything that isn’t internal linking: speed, titles, schema, and links from other sites. Other tools measure those well, and a weak check would make the strong ones harder to trust.
- Search traffic. The score is worked out from the crawl alone, so it means the same with or without Search Console connected.
- Other sites. A 70 is your own site’s counts, not a ranking against anyone else’s.
No model judges any part of it. The one place AI helps is upstream: grouping your posts into topics, which Organised reads. Free scans group topics too, once a site is big enough to have them. Everything after that is the arithmetic on this page.
When a part, or the whole score, is missing
A part the scan couldn’t measure says Not measured. It is never scored 0, because a 0 that means “we don’t know” reads as a verdict. Its weight is shared among the parts that were measured, in proportion. Without Organised, for example, Linked counts 50, Working links 25 and Reachable 25.
- Reachable isn’t measured when the scan found no home page to count clicks from.
- Organised isn’t measured when no topic big enough to judge was built on that scan: the site was too small to group, or the grouping didn’t run.
- Linked and Working links need at least one post and one link in an article.
Sometimes there is no score at all, and the audit says why instead of showing a number:
- Fewer than 5 posts. On a site that small, one new link swings the score by ten points or more.
- We couldn’t read your articles. When a theme loads its text in a way the crawl can’t see, every figure would describe the theme, not your writing. See the crawl was blocked or stopped short.
The score covers the pages a scan read: a folder, if you scanned one such as /blog/, and the first 500 pages on a free scan.
How the formula changes
Each score is stored with the version of the formula that made it. The current formula is version 1. If we change a weight or a cost, the version goes up by one and the change is listed here. Scores you already have keep the version they were made with, so last month’s 64 is never quietly re-read under this month’s rules.
Formula versions Version Date What changed 1 16 October 2026 First published formula: four parts weighted 20/40/20/20, the link costs above, half credit for a topic that leaks or competes, and no score under five posts.
What you should see
A number you can take apart: four parts, each with the counts behind it and the points it cost. To get yours, run the free internal link audit. On a paid plan your site is scanned, and scored, every week.
Tell us through the help form with the address you scanned. Every score can be checked against the counts beside it, and if one doesn’t add up, that’s a bug we want to fix.
Questions
Is the Silotree Score an SEO score?
No. It measures one thing: how the pages on your site link to each other. It doesn’t look at speed, titles, schema or links from other sites, and a band such as Good is a label for the number, not a promise about rankings.
How is it different from Domain Rating?
Ahrefs’ Domain Rating measures links from other websites to yours. The Silotree Score measures only the links on your own site, which you control. You can raise it yourself, this afternoon, by linking your own posts.
Is it the same as the habits score from the internal linking habits check?
No. The habits check scores what you tell it about how you link. The Silotree Score is measured from a crawl of your site. The two often disagree, usually because menus make posts look linked when no article links to them.
My score changed but I didn’t change anything. Why?
Each scan scores the site as it is that day. A new post with no links in, a page that started returning an error or a redirect added by another plugin all move it. The part that changed tells you which.
How do I raise my score?
Start with the part that costs the most points; the audit lists it first, with the counts behind it. On most sites that is Linked: give each post nothing links to a link from a related article, then work towards three.