Reading your report

RealSiteWorth returns a range, not a price. This page explains what each part of that output means, which parts you can act on, and which parts are telling you about our data rather than about your asset.

The rule that shapes everything below: a deterministic engine computes every dollar figure, score, and percentage. The AI writes prose about those numbers afterwards. It never produces them.

The range, the midpoint, and why the band is that wide

The engine computes a midpoint first, then draws the band around it:

low  = round(mid × (1 - halfWidth))
high = round(mid × (1 + halfWidth))

halfWidth is not a statistical interval. It is a direct function of the published confidence — the percentage shown on the report, after banding (see "What confidence actually measures" below), not the raw internal score:

halfWidth = lerp(0.55, 0.15, publishedConfidence)

So the band narrows from ±55% toward ±15% as published confidence rises from 0% toward 100%. Nothing in between is a percentile. A wide band means "we measured fewer things", not "your site is volatile". No automated report ever publishes 100% confidence, so ±15% is a theoretical floor the halfWidth formula approaches but a report never actually reaches — see the band-by-run-type table below for what each run type can really show.

Working the arithmetic out by run type — each run type's confidence is capped inside its own band, so this is also the real width range you'll see:

How to read it. Plan around the low end. The low end is also the number the Roadmap optimises against, so the two are consistent with each other.

The engine has an owner-verified-figures path that would raise a Full Diligence ceiling to 95% (±17%), but no caller wires it up yet — every production Deep run tops out at the 90% ceiling above.

Two hard edges worth knowing:

• Nothing reads $0. A valued asset is floored at $1. This only stops a literal "$0" readout. It never inflates a real number. A no-data lookup is not floored at all, because putting a dollar figure on an asset we have no data for would be inventing one.
• Above a $5,000,000 midpoint the band goes to the maximum ±55% width, and the evidence-quality score that feeds confidence is capped at 0.44. Past that point there are no comparable sales to anchor to, and the report says so with a beyond_comp_range flag. That cap does not force the label below MEDIUM on every run type — see "Caps that override the arithmetic" below for what it actually publishes on a Full versus a Full Diligence run. Treat a large number with that flag as directional only.

What confidence actually measures

Confidence is computed in two stages. First, an internal evidence-quality score starts at 1.0 and loses points for things we could not measure or things that make the asset fragile:

Second, that quality score (after the caps below) is placed inside the band for the run type that produced it — Quick, Full, or Full Diligence — and the position inside that band is what gets published and labelled. See "The range, the midpoint, and why the band is that wide" above for the three bands. This is why a Quick run can never read HIGH and a Full Diligence run can never read LOW, no matter how the quality score comes out: the run type sets the ceiling and the floor first.

The published percentage gets a label:

• HIGH at 75% and above
• MEDIUM at 45% and above
• LOW below that

Because Full tops out its band at 70% and Full Diligence starts its band at 70%, a Full valuation can never read HIGH (it maxes out at 70% MEDIUM), and a Full Diligence Valuation can never read LOW.

The missing-signal penalty is the one that dominates the quality score. These ten signals are tracked, and each one that comes back null costs 0.15:

domainAge, trafficMonthly, trafficConcentration, referringDomains, domainRank, earliestSnapshotYear, archiveSnapshotCount, searchInterestSlope, backlinkSpamScore, aiVisibility

Seven missing signals drive the quality score to zero on their own. That is usually why a band looks wide. See "Making the estimate better" below, because which signals we even attempt depends on how the run was made.

Caps that override the arithmetic

Some conditions clamp the evidence-quality score no matter how clean the rest of the data is. Because that score is then placed inside the run type's band rather than published directly, a capped run does not necessarily read LOW — it reads low within whichever band its run type uses. A Full valuation with quality capped at 0.44, for example, publishes around 50% (MEDIUM, the low end of Full's 35–70% band); the same cap on a Full Diligence run publishes around 79% (HIGH, inside Full Diligence's 70–90% band). Only on a Quick run, whose whole band sits below the 45% MEDIUM floor, does a cap like this reliably read LOW.

A brand-risk cap is not an accusation. It says the same thing every time: transferability could not be established from public data, so we refuse to show a tight band around a number that assumes a clean sale.

Why free reports read LOW

Free accounts can only run the Quick depth — Full and Full Diligence Valuations require a paid plan — and Quick's band is 10–35%, entirely below the 45% MEDIUM floor. So every free website valuation reads LOW, however clean the underlying data is. That ceiling comes from the run depth itself. A separate teaser display cap (capFreeTeaserConfidence, LOW ≤35%) also exists and runs on every Quick/teaser report, but it is redundant with Quick's own 35% ceiling — it never has room to bite any harder than the band already does.

One exception worth knowing: a Quick run never attempts a traffic pull, so when it finds no readable site content at all, it falls back to a bare-domain valuation rather than guessing. The domain-name model's own confidence can range from 40% to 70% by name length, but a free/anonymous run is still capped at LOW, ≤35% published confidence before it ships — the same free-teaser ceiling every other free run gets. So a bare domain does not read higher than an operating site on a free run; both are capped at the same ceiling. That is a difference in which model produced the number, not a statement that the domain is better understood.

A, B, or C: which model produced your number

Every report carries a mode, and the mode changes what the range means.

In modes A and B the domain-name value acts as a floor under the business range. In mode C the name value is the valuation, with a deliberately asymmetric band of mid × [0.5, 1.6] and confidence set by the name's length bucket.

If you expected mode A and got mode C, the cause depends on run depth. A Quick run — on any tier — never attempts a traffic pull, so its fallback triggers when no readable site content came back at all, not from a null traffic reading. A paid Standard or Deep run does attempt traffic: there, a null or zero traffic reading never falls back to bare-domain treatment — it returns a 502 "too thin" error instead of guessing.

RSW Auth: what the open web has invested in you

Authority is a 0 to 100 composite, higher is better. Each component is normalised against a benchmark, capped at 1.5× that benchmark, then combined as a weighted mean.

Grades: A at 85, B+ at 70, B at 55, C at 40, D below that.

Three things to know before you act on this score:

1. Missing components are excluded, not zeroed. The weights renormalise over whatever was actually measured, and the missing component is shown as "Not measured" rather than as a 0. A component list full of "Not measured" with a score of 0 means we had no authority data at all. It does not mean your site has no authority. Read the component list before you read the number.
2. The 1.5× cap is real. Pushing referring domains from 375 to 900 moves this score by nothing, because 375 already hits the cap. If the score is what you are optimising, work on a component that is still below its benchmark.
3. Archive history is scored on continuity, displayed raw. If the domain was dropped or parked for a stretch, the score uses drop-discounted years while the report shows the true archive years. The Memo explains the gap. A large gap between "20 years of archive" and a mediocre archive contribution is that discount at work.

RSW Trust: how clean the profile looks to a buyer

Trust is also 0 to 100 and also reads higher-is-better, but it is computed inside-out. The engine builds a risk magnitude from the components, then exposes Trust = 100 − magnitude. Components are capped at 2× benchmark.

Grades: STRONG at 75, FAIR at 45, WEAK below that.

Two readings that will save you from chasing the wrong thing:

The toxic-backlinks figure is a measured spam score, not a constant. When the backlink provider returns a spam-score reading, Trust uses it directly (capped at 2× the 25% benchmark); when it did not run or came back empty, the component shows Not measured instead of a placeholder number. Read a real number as real signal, and read "Not measured" as absent evidence, not a clean bill of health.

Traffic concentration is 45% of the weight, and it's the one you can usually act on. If your Trust score is low and traffic concentration is measured, that is where the score is coming from. Single-channel dependency (channelSearchShare) carries the same 45% weight in the model, but it is not measured on any website run today — it always shows Not measured — so it never moves the score and never produces a Roadmap dollar lift. Traffic concentration is the component with a real counterfactual in the Roadmap.

One consequence of the weighted-mean design: when most Trust components come back Not measured, the score is a mean over whichever few actually measured — so a Trust score built from one measured component tells you far less than one built from several. Check the component list, not just the number, before you act on it.

The AI Memo and the Value-Gap Roadmap

Both are written by a language model that is handed the finished numbers and explicitly forbidden from touching them. The instruction it receives is direct: every figure was computed by the deterministic engine, and it must not invent, change, recompute, or contradict any number, or state facts it cannot derive from the supplied data.

The Memo

Five sections, always in this order:

1. Summary
2. Revenue and quality of earnings
3. Traffic and authority
4. What we did not include
5. What changes the number

Read section 4 first. The model is given an explicit ledger splitting signals into observed and omitted, and is told that an omitted signal must be acknowledged as missing and never narrated as a measurement. Section 4 is where the wide band gets explained in plain language. It is the most useful part of the Memo for deciding how much to trust the rest of it.

The Roadmap

The Roadmap is not AI-generated advice ranked by an AI. The ranking is arithmetic.

For each weakness the engine flags, it re-runs the entire valuation with that one input patched to its benchmark, then measures how much range.low rose. That rise is the lift. If it clears $250 the item is labelled Value lift. If it does not, the item is labelled Confidence, and no dollar figure is attached. Items are sorted dollar-lifts first by size, then confidence items. The model writes only the title, effort, timing, and explanation, and any $ token it produces is stripped from that prose.

Which weaknesses can produce a dollar lift, and which are confidence-only:

That table is the practical takeaway of the whole Roadmap. If you want the number to move, the three items at the top are the only ones with a mechanical path to moving it. single_channel_dependency is left off this table because it is never measured on a website run today, so it cannot appear as a weakness at all. The rest widen or narrow how sure we are.

What each tier sees

Two details the table does not capture:

• A fresh free website valuation returns no Memo and no Roadmap at all. The free response is trimmed to the band, confidence, and signals. A reduced preview depth is applied by the saved-report viewer to reports that already contain a Memo.
• The free export carries a TEASER watermark. Paid exports do not.

Monthly allowances, from the tier constants:

Anonymous callers are capped at 3 valuations per day per IP, shared across every valuation surface rather than 3 per surface.

Both paid plans include the Full Diligence Valuation: Basic includes 3 per month, Pro includes 25. Pick Deep in the Run Valuation depth selector to spend one. A Deep run is the same run on either plan — identical evidence, identical operations, identical report content.

RSW Auth and Trust are shown from Basic upward. A free run collects only domain age and page authority — not the traffic, backlink, and search-trend evidence Basic and Pro add — so the report labels both Not measured on a free run rather than inventing a score from a partial pull.

Making the estimate better

1. Choose Full or Full Diligence. That is what changes which data sources run.

Which adapters fire is decided by a pull profile, and the profile is chosen by your package and the run depth together. Signing in does not change it: an anonymous run and a signed-in free run pull the identical, deliberately shallow set.

Free, Basic and Pro are packages. Quick (lite), Full (standard) and Full Diligence (deep) are run depths — the second name in each pair is what the dashboard selector and the API use. Both paid packages can run a Full Diligence Valuation, and it collects exactly the same evidence on either — they differ only in how many you get each month. Free never reaches Full or Full Diligence at all; every free run, signed in or not, is a Quick run.

The column headings below use the run-type names, because that is the axis: "Standard" is the Full valuation, "Deep" is the Full Diligence Valuation.

Anonymous and signed-in free runs are byte-for-byte the same pull: domain age and page authority only. Domain age is one of the ten confidence-tracked signals above; page authority is not part of the confidence universe at all — it feeds the Authority score, not the quality score. A free run reads LOW because every Quick run's published-confidence band (10–35%) sits entirely below the 45% MEDIUM floor, not because of missing-signal penalties — see "Why free reports read LOW" above. Signing in raises your monthly allowance and saves your history; it does not add a single data source, and it does not raise your confidence.

Note what the table also shows: the two Full Diligence columns are identical. Domain rank, traffic concentration, ranked keywords, the bounded referring-domain sample and the new/lost backlink trend all need a Deep run, and a Deep run collects every one of them on Basic and on Pro alike. On a *Standard* run those signals are simply not collected — they are unpurchased depth, not failed measurements — the Authority score falls back to page authority for its rank component, and Trust runs without measured concentration. That is why the RSW Auth component list on a Standard report (Basic or Pro) shows "Not measured" against domain rank, and why running a Deep valuation — on Basic or Pro — is the only way to fill it in.

The only real lever on Free is upgrading to a paid plan, which unlocks the Standard and Deep depths and everything they collect. Signing in without upgrading changes your quota and saves your history — it does not change what the engine measures.

2. Supply owner numbers for a store or business valuation

For an e-commerce or business asset, you can hand us real financials instead of having earnings inferred from traffic. This surface requires Basic or above. Anonymous and free signed-in callers get a 403.

Confidence runs through the same Full-valuation band as every other Standard run, and typed owner inputs are a box count, not owner-verified proof, so a store valuation reads medium, ±20% for any combination of the five fields — with one exception: when the modeled midpoint passes the $5,000,000 comparable-sale ceiling, the run is contained to low, ±35% instead, the same beyond-comp-range treatment every other surface gets. monthlyRevenue is required just to start the run, so a store valuation never has too little input to produce a number:

The five counted fields are monthlyRevenue, monthlyCogs, monthlyEmployeeCost, topTrafficSourcePct, and monthlyChurnPct. Only monthlyRevenue is required, and there is no inference path for it. Without it the request is rejected rather than guessed at. Store runs publish inside the Full valuation's band, so they never read HIGH.

Every other field is optional and either adjusts the multiple or leaves the conservative band untouched:

{
  "monthlyRevenue": 42000,
  "monthlyCogs": 18500,
  "monthlyEmployeeCost": 6200,
  "monthlyChurnPct": 0.04,
  "topTrafficSourcePct": 0.55,
  "platform": "shopify",
  "businessModel": "held_inventory",
  "ecommerceCategory": "beauty",
  "averageOrderValue": 78,
  "monthlyOrders": 538,
  "inventoryValue": 60000,
  "ltvCacRatio": 3.2,
  "topSkuRevenuePct": 0.31,
  "ip": { "trademark": true, "patentOrFormulation": false },
  "ageYears": 4
}

Three things happen to that payload that are worth understanding:

• Omitted costs are inferred and labelled. If you leave out COGS, a category-typical fraction of revenue is used and marked inferred so the Memo can disclose it. Omitted employee cost defaults to 25% of revenue. Your own number always wins.
• Risk inputs cut the multiple, they do not pad it. Monthly churn above 3% costs 8%, above 6% costs 18%, above 10% costs 30% of the band midpoint. A single traffic channel above 40% costs 5%, above 60% costs 15%, above 80% costs 25%.
• Negative earnings are refused, not floored. If revenue minus COGS minus employee cost is zero or below, the run fails with a stated reason instead of returning a number.

Both business and domain valuations then take the same 0.9 conservatism haircut after the multiple. The multiple bands themselves are calibrated to sit at or below the median of real broker sold-comps for each category. This tool is built to come in under a broker quote, not over it.

3. Re-run when the data ages

Valuations cache for 14 days. A saved report is flagged stale in the last 3 days of that window and expired after it. Re-running a valuation is what refreshes the cached report.

4. Read the signal receipt before you argue with the number

Every metric that could not be measured renders as "Not measured", never as 0, "—", or "0%". If a component you care about shows that label, the fix is a deeper run or an owner input, not a different interpretation of the number.

Pulling the useful fields out of a saved report:

jq '{
  mode,
  range,
  confidence,
  flags,
  weaknesses,
  beyondCompRange,
  authority: {score: .authority.score, grade: .authority.grade},
  trust: {score: .trust.score, grade: .trust.grade},
  unmeasured: [ (.authority.components + .trust.components)[]
                | select(.value == null) | .label ]
}' report.json

The unmeasured list is the honest answer to "why is the band that wide".

The disclaimers, in full

These ship with the product. They are not boilerplate we are paraphrasing here.

On every page that displays a valuation figure:

This value range is an automated estimate. The Memo and Roadmap explain the estimate after it exists; they do not generate the number or invent facts.

Directly under a valuation band:

Not financial advice. This is an automated estimate, not a formal appraisal, investment advice, or a recommendation to buy or sell. Real Site Worth is not a financial advisor, broker, or appraiser.

The full version:

Not financial or investment advice. Anything here about value, "worth", multiples, or asset comparison is an automated estimate and editorial opinion, never a formal appraisal, financial or investment advice, or a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold. Real Site Worth is not a financial advisor, broker, or appraiser. Do your own due diligence.

Shipped with every store and business valuation result:

This is a market-informed algorithmic estimate, not a formal valuation or offer to buy. The calculation uses a conservative multiple band based on real broker comparable-sale data and is not a substitute for a licensed business valuation. Results should prompt, not replace, negotiation with a qualified buyer or M&A advisor.

That last line is the right frame for the whole report. Use it to open a conversation with a buyer, a broker, or your own books. Do not use it to close one.