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Tool 02

Can an AI answercite your site?

Fifteen questions on whether assistants can find your pages, parse what is on them and quote you as a source. You get a score and the fixes in the order worth doing them.

15 checksWeighted scoreFreeNo emailNothing stored
Tool 02

AI Search Readiness Scorecard

Answer fifteen questions about your site and get a weighted score plus an ordered list of what to fix first. Checks are weighted by impact, so the list tells you what matters rather than what is easy.

Structured data

Assistants rely on structured data to work out what a page is about. Without it they infer, and inference favours sites that did not make them guess.

Structured data

Conflicting names, addresses or descriptions split your entity in the model's understanding. Pick one form and repeat it.

Structured data

Marked-up questions are the easiest thing for an assistant to lift and attribute. The content must be visible, not hidden.

Answerability

Assistants extract a passage, not a page. If the answer arrives in paragraph six, the passage they quote comes from a competitor.

Answerability

Question headings match the shape of a prompt far better than noun-phrase headings do.

Answerability

“Founded in 2019 in Leeds” is quotable. “A passionate team of innovators” is not.

Crawlability

Many sites block these accidentally through plugin defaults or a security setting. Blocked means invisible, permanently.

Crawlability

Several AI crawlers do not execute JavaScript. Content that only appears after a script runs may never be seen.

Crawlability

Still the fastest way to get new content discovered by anything that crawls.

Authority

Unattributed content is weak evidence. A named author with a traceable history is what distinguishes a source from a page.

Authority

Third-party mentions build the entity associations that make a model confident enough to name you.

Authority

Undated content gets treated as potentially stale, and stale content loses to fresher sources.

Technical

Slow pages get crawled less. Less crawling means less of your content is known.

Technical

Duplicates make it ambiguous which page should represent a topic, so neither gets chosen.

Technical

Heading structure is how a parser segments your content into passages worth quoting.

Why this exists

Ranking and being cited are different jobs

Classic SEO optimises to appear in a list of ten links. AI assistants do not produce a list of ten links. They produce an answer, citing perhaps three sources, and the selection criteria are not identical to ranking criteria.

What gets a passage quoted is clarity, structure and attribution: a clean statement of fact, marked up so a machine knows what it is, attributed to someone identifiable, on a page a crawler can actually read. Plenty of sites that rank well fail all four.

The weightings here are my own judgement from delivery work, not an industry standard. If you disagree with them, tell me why and I will change them.

Disagree with the weightings?

They are my judgement from delivery work rather than an industry standard. Tell me why and I will change them.

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