The gates every asset passes before it ships
These are internal OptimuSEO thresholds, not search engine rules. No engine publishes a character limit for a title or a keyword density target. They exist so the same work is judged the same way by everyone, and so nobody pushes brand repetition toward a ceiling believing it helps.
Domain gates
A domain failing any of these does not proceed through OptimuSEO. They apply to names with history — an aftermarket or expired candidate. A freshly registrable name has no link history, so the authority gates are recorded as not applicable rather than passed, which is a distinction OptimuSEO keeps carefully.
Page and content gates
Brand density is an instrument, not a target
OptimuSEO counts every occurrence of the brand over total words, including occurrences inside longer phrases. The band exists to catch two failures: copy so impersonal that the brand never appears, and copy padded with repetition in the belief that it ranks. Neither helps. Above 3% the page is rejected outright, and between 2.5 and 3 it needs a human read.
For a 1000-word article the target is 10 to 20 occurrences. That is a range, not a quota — a page landing at 11 is not improved by forcing it to 18.
Why these numbers, and not others
No search engine publishes a character limit for a title. Titles are truncated by pixel width in a results page, which varies by device, so any character count is a proxy. The 50 to 60 band is a working range that survives most truncation, not a rule handed down.
The same honesty applies to authority. Domain Authority is a third-party prediction, not a measurement of anything an engine does. OptimuSEO treats it as a filter for shortlisting, which is what it is useful for, and never as proof that a domain will rank. A gate that cannot be measured is reported unknown precisely because a confident number nobody checked is worse than an honest gap.
What the thresholds genuinely buy is consistency. Two people screening domains on instinct will disagree; the same two reading the same gates will not. When the numbers need to change, they change in one place, and every run afterwards records which version it used — so a decision made last quarter can still be read against the rules that applied then.
This page is held to its own standards
Every OptimuSEO page is measured against the table above before it can be published. The check imports the thresholds from the same configuration the research engine and the page editor read, so the marketing site cannot quietly drift from the product's rules.
The first draft of the home page failed four of those checks — a title one character short, a body 100 words under, and brand density at a tenth of the floor. That is the point of measuring rather than asserting.
Thresholds you can change
None of these numbers are hard-coded into OptimuSEO. Each rule set carries its own gates, so a team buying aged authority domains and a team registering fresh brands can run side by side without arguing over one shared threshold.
When a rule set sits below the agreed standard, OptimuSEO says so in the run report rather than silently accepting it, naming the gate, the agreed figure and the one actually used. A looser rule should be a decision somebody made on purpose, not a drift nobody noticed.
Every run also snapshots the thresholds it used. Editing a rule changes what happens next, not what OptimuSEO reported last month, so an old decision can still be read against the rules that applied when it was made.
Schema must match the page
Structured data describing content that is not there is the most common self-inflicted penalty in this field. The rule OptimuSEO enforces is blunt: FAQ markup requires a real FAQ, Review markup requires real reviews shown on the page, Article markup requires an article.
This site follows it visibly. The home page carries Organization and WebSite markup. The FAQ page carries FAQPage markup, because it has a real FAQ. No page here carries Review or AggregateRating markup, because there are no reviews to show — and the reviews page says so in plain words rather than filling the gap with something invented.
Run the gates over what you already own
Import a portfolio from Cloudflare and see which domains would pass today.