Two things changed today: a Docs Readiness Audit rubric refinement (Cat 7 split into 7a + 7b; meta-description moved Cat 4 → Cat 8) plus a more specific methodology page — citation-prediction boundary stated, Score-deterministic / Story-LLM-written separation made explicit, hard-cap trigger conditions inlined, references-and-conventions split, known-limitations listed. Alongside the rubric cut: Site Readiness Audit v1.0 — the consumer-neutral baseline for crawlability, semantic structure, and raw-HTML availability — entering internal preview.
This post is the narrative changelog explaining the v5.0 change. The published rubric is the canonical scoring reference; the methodology is the thinking it sits inside.
At a glance
- What changed: Cat 7 (10 pts in v4.3) splits into Cat 7a — Architecture for Traversal (4 pts) and Cat 7b — Payload Efficiency (6 pts). Meta-description moves from Cat 4 to Cat 8 (Cat 4: 12 → 11 pts; Cat 8: 9 → 10 pts). Total weight unchanged at 100.
- What didn’t change: universal categories (Cat 1, 5, 6) and their hard caps. Cat 2, 3 weights. The Score scale, the Score + Story contract, the determinism property, the Lightning ceiling.
- Product: Site Readiness Audit v1.0 enters internal preview — consumer-neutral baseline.
Why we split Cat 7
v4.3 scored site architecture and payload efficiency as a single 10-point bucket. Traversal signals (sitemap, BreadcrumbList, internal-link density) and payload signals (raw-HTML text-to-HTML ratio, visible-text floor) measure different failure modes, with different owners and different remediation paths. Bundling them obscured both diagnostics. Splitting them gives traversal and payload independent point losses, which makes the Story actionable instead of vague.
The combined weight stays at 10 because the relative re-evaluation of the two split categories against a real cohort is a future calibration output, not a v5.0 deliverable. Both 7a and 7b weights are explicitly provisional; they move when the data lands.
The structural delta table is in the rubric changelog.
Why meta-description moved
Cat 4 — AEO Readiness narrows in v5.0 to signals specifically about answer-span extractability: question-style headings, concise direct answers in the paragraph immediately following each question heading, list and table structure. Identity signals — title quality, Organization schema, canonical URLs, Open Graph basics — already lived in Cat 8. Meta-description belongs with the other identity signals. Cat 4 lost one point; Cat 8 gained one; total stayed flat.
Reconciling a v4.3 Score
Customers who ran an audit under v4.3 can map their prior Score to v5.0 categories using the structural crosswalk — a side-by-side category mapping with structural deltas isolated, published alongside the changelog entry on /docs/rubric/#changelog. Per-customer numeric-Score reconciliation across versions is not part of v5.0; if and when paid customers are affected by a future version cut, that crosswalk gets authored against persisted scan data at that time.
Site Readiness Audit v1.0 — internal preview
The Docs Readiness Audit is the calibrated v5.0 product. Underneath it sits a smaller thing we are also building in public: the Site Readiness Audit v1.0 — universal hygiene only, scored against Cat 1 AI Crawlability & Access, Cat 5 Content Structure, and Cat 6 SSR & AI Rendering. No per-consumer calibration. It is designed to become the consumer-neutral baseline anyone can test their site against, and the floor the per-consumer rubrics build on top of.
Status: internal preview. The order is intentional: the consumer-neutral baseline ships, and the calibrated rubrics layer on top.
Why this shape
A measurement framework that never tests its assumptions is just positioning. v5.0 names what is provisional, names what is universal, and names what moves when evidence moves it. The Site Readiness Audit is the consumer-neutral baseline the rest stands on. The Docs Readiness Audit is the calibration on top.
For the rubric itself, see the published rubric. For the conceptual frame, see the methodology.
Cite this version: Obaron Docs Readiness Audit v5.0. Published 2026-05-04. Canonical methodology: /docs/methodology/. Published rubric: /docs/rubric/. Changelog narrative: /blog/methodology-v5-changelog/.