Signals Copy tells

Navigation to pages that were never built

Category
Copy tells
Direction
Pushes the score up
Weight
+13
Floor
62

What it is

How the words were written. A human under deadline writes like this too. Copy tells are suggestive, never conclusive.

How it is weighted

13 points is mid-weight: real evidence, not a smoking gun. On its own it moves the number a few points.

It also carries a floor of 62. When this fires the score is not allowed to fall below that number, however much craft the rest of the page shows — some tells settle the question rather than contribute to it.

What to do about it

Build the pages the nav promises, or remove the links. Then open each one and confirm it resolves — a stub is the same failure as a 404.

Where it fires

None of our worked examples trip this one, which is itself informative — it means the pattern is rarer than the tells that fire constantly, so when it does show up it is worth paying attention to.

Scan a page for this signal →