45 points — sibling similarity

The score’s largest part measures how much a page reads like the other pages generated from the same blueprint — the doorway-page signature search engines penalise. The page’s visible text is broken into five-word shingles and compared against each sibling using Jaccard overlap, with your merge-token values stripped first so swapping “Rye” for “Lewes” earns nothing. The worst sibling drives the result: below 55% similarity the page keeps all 45 points, above 85% it keeps none, with a straight line between. The Quality screen names the closest sibling and its percentage, so “89% similar to Boiler Installation in Lewes” is a finding, not a feeling.

35 points — local substance

• 20 points for filled local content slots, pro-rated against a forty-word target per slot.
• 10 points for a written area descriptor of at least fifty words — editable inline from the Quality screen.
• 5 points for something genuinely of the place: a unique image, an embedded map, or an answered area-specific FAQ (a details block with the question as its summary).

20 points — the thin-content floor

Ten points for enough original, non-template words to be worth indexing; five for exactly one H1; five for a meta description — through your SEO plugin if one is active, through Townsmith’s own field if not.

The gate

The publishing threshold defaults to 60 and is adjustable in Settings. On the free plugin the gate is advisory: publishing a below-threshold page shows a clear warning and a fix list, but the decision stays yours. Pro adds the enforced mode, which keeps below-threshold pages as drafts until they earn their way out — useful when several people publish. The pre-publish panel re-checks the live content the moment the publish flow opens, lists what to fix, and jumps to the offending block. Scores recompute in the background on every save, never inline, so editing stays fast; the Quality screen shows each page’s trend since its last check.

Next: Updating pages when the blueprint changes — without ever touching your edits.