The Fabrication Study: Graders That Score a Page They Never Fetched.
A dated, reproducible look at how the industry's free SEO graders return a "grade" for pages they demonstrably could not have read. The method is here; the anonymized evidence is attached to the published study.
Give a Grader a Page It Cannot Have Read. See If It Grades Anyway.
Submit a URL behind a block, or one freshly created — a page no crawler could have fetched in time to analyse it.
Record whether the tool returns a numeric grade, letter, or checklist for content it had no way to read.
Run the same URL through an instrument that reports the block honestly. The gap between the two is the finding.
Anonymized Captures — Naming Withheld Pending Approval.
By default the evidence is anonymized: the reproducible method stands on its own, and we render no legal conclusion about any named grader. Naming is a deliberate decision, not a default.
Anonymized capture: a grader returning a score for an unreadable page. Attached with the published, dated study.
Side-by-side: the same URL, read honestly — the block reported, no score invented. Attached with the published, dated study.