The five pillars
The checker scores five pillars, weighted by how much they actually gate AI answers:
- AI crawler access — 25 pts. Per-bot verdicts for GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and CCBot. Explicit allows score full marks; default-allow scores well; any hard block on a major bot costs real points.
- Citability — 25 pts. Title quality, a single clear H1, logical heading hierarchy, question-shaped sections and enough content depth to lift passages from.
- Structured data — 20 pts. JSON-LD identity (Organization/WebSite) plus rich types like FAQPage and Article — the machine-readable layer that says what your page is.
- llms.txt — 15 pts. The curated map for LLMs at your site root. Young standard, cheap win, and an explicit signal that you welcome machine readers.
- Fundamentals — 15 pts. HTTPS, canonical URL, mobile viewport, OpenGraph. Table stakes that still trip real sites.
Score bands
- 85–100 · AI-ready. Engines can access, parse and quote you without friction. Maintain: recheck after every deploy.
- 70–84 · Competitive. Minor gaps. Usually one schema type or a missing explicit allow away from the top band.
- 50–69 · Leaking. Meaningful blocks — often a partial crawler block or missing structure. You're invisible for some engines or some query types.
- Below 50 · Effectively invisible. At least one hard gate (blocked AI crawler, no parseable structure). AI answers can't use you regardless of content quality.
What moves each pillar fastest
- Crawler access: an explicit Allow block for the six AI bots in robots.txt — ten minutes, see allow AI crawlers.
- Citability: rewrite your top pages' headings as questions and make each section's first sentence a direct answer.
- Structured data: add Organization + FAQPage JSON-LD — two script blocks, biggest schema ROI.
- llms.txt: generate and upload one in minutes with the llms.txt generator.
Most sites land between 40 and 70 on first check — and most of the missing points are the two ten-minute fixes above. Run your URL through the checker, fix what's red, re-check. Score context for your industry: accountants, law firms, ecommerce, SaaS.