It has been proposed that the concept of effective surface recombination speed S-eff can be used with surface photovoltage measurements to evaluate the status of the semiconductor surface. This proposal is examined for Schottky-coupled surface photovoltage measurements, and it is shown that S-eff has a complicated dependence on physical surface quantities such as the built-in potential, the actual surface recombination speed, and the space-charge generation and recombination currents. As a result, S-eff is not a direct measure of the surface recombination speed for a metal contact to an ideal semiconductor surface, and it is not even a simple figure of merit for damaged semiconductor surfaces.