Your dashboard shows a compliance percentage in two related spots: one big number near the top, and a per-category breakdown right below it. Confusingly, the two dashboard pages label them differently — the main Dashboard page calls them "Overall Protection" and "Fleet Protection by Category," while the Overview page calls the same two numbers "Pass Threshold" (with a "Compliance" label in its donut chart) and "Filtering Effectiveness by Category." Different names, same underlying numbers. Here's how they're actually calculated, from the ground up.
Every scan tests a batch of domains in each category — say, adult content. A device's score for that category on that scan is simply how many of those domains were blocked, divided by how many were tested. Block 49 out of 50, and that device scores 98% for that category on that scan. This happens separately for every category tested and every device you monitor.
The per-category breakdown ("Fleet Protection by Category") takes every device's most recent score in a category and checks how many clear your passing threshold. If 8 of your 10 monitored devices are at or above the threshold for adult content, that category shows 80%.
A few things worth knowing about what counts here:
"At or above the threshold" defaults to 90%, but it's set per account, not fixed site-wide — you can adjust it. A device group can also have its own threshold, separate from your account's overall one.
The headline percentage — "Overall Protection" on the Dashboard page, "Pass Threshold" / "Compliance" on Overview — isn't an average of device scores, and it isn't an average of the category rates either. It's a count one level up: of the categories you have data for, what fraction have already cleared the threshold at the category level? If 4 of your 5 tested categories are passing, that headline number reads 80% — regardless of how far above or below the threshold each individual category actually is.
For what each compliance category actually tests, see what each compliance standard actually checks. This article is about how the percentage itself is built, not what's behind each category.