Feature
Website Trust Score
How the Website Trust Inspector scores a site: which technical signals it looks at, what each finding records, and why the evidence matters more than the number.
The trust score summarizes technical signals that tend to separate maintained, legitimate websites from hastily built or deceptive ones. It’s a starting point for judgment, built so you can see exactly why it came out the way it did.
What feeds the score
- HTTPS: whether the final page is served over HTTPS, and whether any redirect drops back to plain HTTP
- Redirects: where the URL ends up, and whether it changes domain on the way
- Security headers: Strict-Transport-Security, Content-Security-Policy, X-Content-Type-Options, Referrer-Policy and Permissions-Policy
- Hostname: whether it uses internationalized (Punycode) characters, which look-alike domains sometimes rely on
Confidence and evidence
Each finding records what was observed, when, and how confident the check is. A check the inspector couldn’t complete, because a site blocked the request for example, is marked unknown and left out of the score rather than counted as good or bad.
The score out of 100 combines internal checks of the connection, headers, redirects, URL structure and page content. Not every input appears as a separate finding, so use the score for a rough comparison and the findings for what to fix.
Limits to keep in mind
The score describes technical setup. It can’t judge whether a business is honest or will deliver what it sells.
New legitimate sites can score lower simply because they’re new or minimal.
The inspector doesn’t check phishing or malware blocklists.
Common questions
- Is a score of 100 a guarantee?
- No. It means these technical checks found nothing concerning. Combine it with other checks before trusting a site with money or personal details.
- Why did a well-known site lose points?
- Large sites sometimes skip headers or use complex redirects. Read the individual findings for what was observed; some inputs to the score, such as page content signals, don’t appear as separate findings.