Methodology: the public scoring rubric
Our score is not a black box. Below are all 46 checks, their weights, their confidence tiers and the public sources they rest on. Everything is versioned, so when a check or a weight changes, you can see exactly what changed and in which version.
Ruleset version: 1.0.0
Two numbers, never mixed
The AI-Readiness score (0 to 100) measures what you control: the weighted sum of categories A through E. Deterministic: the same inputs always produce the same score.
The live visibility index (“mentioned in X of N answers”) measures the outcome. We report it separately, because blending it into the score would penalize new sites for their age, not for fixable defects.
Categories and weights
Category B carries the highest weight. Content that only appears after JavaScript runs is the most common fatal defect, and the one we can prove most clearly: we set the raw HTML next to the rendered DOM and show you exactly what vanished.
| Category | Weight | Nature |
|---|---|---|
| A AI access & crawlability | 22 | deterministic |
| B Machine-readable content (no JS) | 28 | deterministic |
| C Structured data & entity clarity | 18 | deterministic |
| D Citability & direct answers | 22 | model-judged, against a written rubric |
| E Technical quality & accessibility | 10 | deterministic |
All checks
A · AI access & crawlability
| Check | Points | Scope | Confidence | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A1 robots.txt reachable and parseable | 3 | site | proven | developers.google.com |
| A2 OAI-SearchBot allowed (ChatGPT search citations) | 3 | site | proven | developers.openai.com |
| A3 GPTBot policy (training exposure only) | 1 | site | proven | developers.openai.com |
| A4 ClaudeBot and Claude-SearchBot allowed | 2 | site | proven | support.claude.com |
| A5 PerplexityBot allowed | 2 | site | proven | docs.perplexity.ai |
| A6 bingbot allowed (Copilot grounding) | 2 | site | proven | bing.com |
| A7 Google-Extended policy (Gemini grounding/training) | 1 | site | proven | developers.google.com |
| A8 No snippet-blocking directives on main content | 2 | page | proven | developers.google.com |
| A9 Pages reachable by AI bot user-agents | 3 | page | proven | source |
| A10 No noindex on audited pages | 1 | page | proven | developers.google.com |
| A11 XML sitemap present, valid and honest | 2 | site | proven | sitemaps.org |
| A12 Canonical URL correct | 1 | page | proven | developers.google.com |
| A13 Short redirect chains | 1 | page | proven | developers.google.com |
B · Machine-readable content (no JS)
| Check | Points | Scope | Confidence | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| B1 Content parity: raw HTML vs rendered DOM | 8 | page | proven | vercel.com |
| B2 Substantive text in raw HTML | 3 | page | consensus | developers.google.com |
| B3 Single H1 and logical heading hierarchy | 3 | page | proven | w3.org |
| B4 Semantic landmarks (main, nav, article) | 2 | page | consensus | w3.org |
| B5 Crawlable <a href> navigation | 3 | page | proven | developers.google.com |
| B6 Images have descriptive alt text | 2 | page | proven | w3.org |
| B7 Data as real tables/lists markup | 2 | page | consensus | w3.org |
| B8 Descriptive link text | 2 | page | proven | w3.org |
| B9 Sane text-to-markup ratio | 1 | page | consensus | source |
| B10 No content locked behind interaction | 2 | page | proven | developers.google.com |
C · Structured data & entity clarity
| Check | Points | Scope | Confidence | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| C1 JSON-LD parses without errors | 3 | page | proven | developers.google.com |
| C2 Organization/LocalBusiness schema with identity | 3 | site | proven | developers.google.com |
| C3 WebSite schema on homepage | 2 | site | proven | schema.org |
| C4 Page-type schema with required properties | 3 | page | proven | developers.google.com |
| C5 Structured data matches visible content | 2 | page | proven | developers.google.com |
| C6 NAP consistency (name, address, phone) | 3 | site | consensus | source |
| C7 html lang matches content language | 1 | page | proven | w3.org |
| C8 hreflang reciprocity (multilingual) | 1 | site | proven | developers.google.com |
D · Citability & direct answers
| Check | Points | Scope | Confidence | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| D1 Direct-answer block near the top | 4 | page | consensus | developers.google.com |
| D2 Question-shaped headings | 3 | page | consensus | developers.google.com |
| D3 Verifiable specifics over marketing prose | 4 | page | correlated | arxiv.org |
| D4 Definition blocks for key terms | 3 | page | consensus | developers.google.com |
| D5 Stand-alone sections (RAG-friendly) | 3 | page | consensus | developers.google.com |
| D6 Freshness signals | 2 | page | consensus | docs.perplexity.ai |
| D7 E-E-A-T surface: authorship and sources | 3 | page | correlated | arxiv.org |
Category D is judged by an AI model against a written, versioned rubric: temperature 0, with the model identity and prompt version stored with every audit for reproducibility. Each criterion earns 0–2 points plus a verbatim quote as evidence.
E · Technical quality & accessibility
| Check | Points | Scope | Confidence | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| E1 HTTPS with HTTP→HTTPS redirect | 2 | site | proven | developers.google.com |
| E2 Core Web Vitals (field data) | 4 | site | proven | developer.chrome.com |
| E3 Mobile viewport meta | 1 | page | proven | developers.google.com |
| E4 Machine-readability basics (title, labels) | 2 | page | proven | w3.org |
| E5 No full-screen interstitial in raw HTML | 1 | page | proven | developers.google.com |
Informational checks (0 points)
We report these for context, but they don't affect your score; because the evidence doesn't (yet) support an effect:
| Check | Points | Scope | Confidence | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A14 CCBot policy (Common Crawl, informational) | 0 | site | consensus | commoncrawl.org |
| C9 Deprecated rich-result types (informational) | 0 | page | proven | developers.google.com |
| I1 llms.txt (speculative) | 0 | site | speculative | llmstxt.org |
| I2 IndexNow (not externally detectable) | 0 | site | consensus | indexnow.org |
| I3 RSS/Atom feed advertised | 0 | site | consensus | source |
| I4 CDN/server context (informational) | 0 | site | consensus | source |
Confidence tiers
Not every “AI best practice” has the same footing in reality. Every check honestly declares what it rests on:
- PROVEN; officially documented or directly measurable behavior (specifications, vendor documentation).
- CORRELATED; supported by public empirical research; a correlation, not a guarantee.
- CONSENSUS; widely accepted industry practice, without direct measurement.
- SPECULATIVE; unproven. Worth 0 points; reported for information only.
Checks that don't apply (for example Product schema on a site with no products) are redistributed within their category; you're never penalized for what you don't have.
The methodology behind our paid work
The audit above scores what you control. When you hire us to act on it, through Implementation or Monitoring, the work is guided by SEO-Kami, the open, MIT-licensed methodology our founder maintains. It uses the same four confidence tiers you see above and the same discipline: keep what's proven apart from what's merely hyped.
We weight entity and earned-media signals
SEO-Kami's reading of the research puts earned media first: branded mentions across the web, a consistent name, address and phone, sameAs links, and verifiable authorship and E-E-A-T. It reads as the strongest lever for AI visibility, well ahead of raw backlinks, so our implementation work prioritizes those signals accordingly.
We optimize for a zero-click reality
Most searches now end without a click, and AI-Overview queries almost always do. So we treat impressions and share of AI citations as the real outcome, not just referral traffic. It is the same reason your live visibility index above is reported separately from your score.
The numbers, as context, not promises
These are CORRELATED-tier findings from public research: a correlation, not a guarantee for any one site. Branded web mentions correlate roughly 0.664 with AI-Overview visibility, versus about 0.218 for backlinks. An estimated 82% of AI citations come from earned media rather than a brand's own pages, and around 83% of AI-Overview queries end with no click. We use these numbers to prioritize the work, and we tell you honestly which fixes are proven and which are speculative.
SEO-Kami is open source under the MIT license. View SEO-Kami on GitHub