How the Direct-Booking Readiness Score works

The Readiness Score on this site is a model, not a measurement: it does not crawl your website or pull data from any external service. You answer a short set of questions about your own listing or website, and the score is computed instantly in your browser from your answers using a fixed, published set of weights. Nothing you enter is sent anywhere — see our privacy page.

The factors and their weights are listed in full, with the reasoning behind each one, in data/vrs_readiness_score_model.json on this domain, kept in sync with this page. We built the model around the handful of signals that most consistently separate vacation rental listings and owner websites that show up in search and get direct enquiries from those that don't: a working, indexable page for the property; a title and description that name the place and the destination; original photos; a way to contact the owner directly; basic technical health (one secure address, one canonical version of each page, a reasonable loading time); and a minimum of fresh, specific content rather than a single static page that never changes.

These are not our opinions in a vacuum — they track the factors Google's own documentation for site owners describes as affecting whether a page can be found and understood at all (see Google Search Central's SEO starter guide and indexing documentation, both public). We do not reproduce Google's text; we built our own checklist and point-weighting from it, and we say so.

The score is a guide to where to spend your next hour of work, not a ranking prediction or a guarantee of bookings. We update the model's wording when Google's own guidance changes; we do not change the weights without updating this page and the JSON file on the same day.