Content Audit shows your pages' SEO Score — a measure of how well your on-page content is optimized for traditional search engines, scored from 0 to 100. It's based on an analysis of your live page and updates daily alongside your performance data (traffic, impressions, position, CTR).
When you open a page in Content Audit and then create a Content Editor from it, you may notice a slight difference in the score. This is expected and not an error.
Here's why:
Content Audit uses a lightweight snapshot. The system quickly scans your live page to estimate the SEO Score. It's designed to be fast and may not fully account for complex layouts or all on-page elements.
Content Editor performs a deeper analysis. When you create a Content Editor from Content Audit, the system re-imports and reprocesses the content more thoroughly — cleaning it, parsing its structure, and preparing it for editing. This can cause the score to shift slightly.
The Editor may detect more or slightly different content than Content Audit's snapshot, which leads to the minor difference you see.
These two tools analyze your content differently, so their scores aren't directly comparable.
Content Audit refreshes daily, fetching live performance data and re-analyzing your page's content as it exists on your site. The score reflects what's currently on your page.
Audit runs a one-time, in-depth analysis of a single page against current SERP data for your target keyword and location. Its recommendations are based on what Surfer finds ranking at the moment you run it. If you have an older Audit, you can click Refresh to update the content analysis — but for fully fresh SERP data, you'll need to run a new Audit.
Because of these differences in methodology and freshness, scores between the two tools should not be compared directly.
