What is the AI Readiness Checker?
The AI Readiness Checker scores how prepared a web page is for AI search engines and AI agents such as ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews. More B2B buyers now start their research by asking an AI assistant, and those assistants can only recommend the companies whose websites they can find, read and trust.
The tool analyzes a single URL and returns an AI Readiness Score from 0 to 100, a breakdown by category, and the three fixes that will raise your score the most for the least effort, each with a copy-and-paste snippet.
What does the AI Readiness Checker test?
The checker runs 13 checks grouped into three categories:
- AI Discovery: Whether your site publishes an llms.txt file, declares Content Signals in robots.txt, and exposes an XML sitemap with last-modified dates.
- Machine-Readable Content: Whether the page serves Markdown to AI agents, shows its content without JavaScript, uses a clear heading outline, has complete metadata, and describes its images with alt text.
- Structured Data & Trust: Whether the page has valid JSON-LD, defines your Organization with logo and social profiles, declares a specific page type (Service, Article, Product, FAQPage), credits a real author on articles, and shows when the content was last updated.
Crawler access is treated as a gate. If the page returns an error, has a noindex tag, or blocks AI search crawlers in robots.txt, the score is reduced and the tool links you to the Crawl Checker for a bot-by-bot breakdown.
How do I use the AI Readiness Checker?
- Enter a URL: Paste the page you want to test. Start with your homepage and your most important service or product page.
- Run the check: The tool fetches the page, robots.txt, llms.txt and sitemap, and requests a Markdown version the way an AI agent would.
- Review your score: See your overall score, how each category performs, and which checks passed, need work or failed.
- Apply the top fixes: Start with the three prioritized fixes. Most are quick wins you can ship in minutes using the snippets provided.
- Re-test: Run the check again after publishing your changes to confirm the improvement.
How are AI Readiness Score bands defined?
- 80–100, AI Ready: The page gives AI systems everything they need to find, read and cite it.
- 60–79, Solid: A good foundation, with a few gaps worth closing.
- 40–59, Basic: Important signals that AI systems rely on are missing.
- 0–39, Not Ready: Critical gaps are keeping the page out of AI answers.
Improving AI readiness is one part of a broader search strategy. If you want help getting your brand cited in AI answers, get a free Search Everywhere Audit or explore our SEO services.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is AI readiness?
AI readiness measures how easily AI systems like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews can discover your website, read its content without running JavaScript, and understand who you are and what each page is about. Pages that are AI ready are more likely to be cited in AI-generated answers.
How is the AI Readiness Score calculated?
The tool runs 13 weighted checks across three categories: AI Discovery (25 points), Machine-Readable Content (35 points) and Structured Data & Trust (40 points). Each check scores fully, partially or not at all, and checks that don't apply to the page (like authorship on a homepage) are excluded. If AI crawlers are blocked from the page, the score is reduced by 25%.
What is llms.txt?
llms.txt is a plain-text Markdown file at the root of your site (yourdomain.com/llms.txt) that gives AI assistants a curated summary of your company and links to your most important pages. It works like a sitemap written for language models.
What are Content Signals?
Content Signals are directives in robots.txt that tell AI companies how they may use your content: for search results (search), for generating AI answers (ai-input) and for training models (ai-train). They let you allow AI search visibility while opting out of model training.
What does Markdown for agents mean?
When an AI agent requests a page with the header Accept: text/markdown, an AI-ready site can return a clean Markdown version instead of full HTML. This removes navigation, scripts and styling, making the content faster and cheaper for agents to read.
Why does content visible without JavaScript matter?
Most AI crawlers, including GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot, do not execute JavaScript. If your text only appears after scripts run in the browser, those crawlers see an empty page. Server-side rendering or static generation fixes this.
How is this different from the Crawl Checker?
The Crawl Checker tells you whether search engine and AI bots can access and index a page, bot by bot. The AI Readiness Checker goes further and scores whether AI systems can understand and cite the page once they reach it. If the page is blocked, the AI Readiness Checker flags it and points you to the Crawl Checker for details.
Does a high AI readiness score guarantee I'll be cited by ChatGPT or Perplexity?
No. The score measures technical readiness, the signals AI systems need to find and trust your content. Whether you're cited also depends on content quality, authority, relevance to the question and each AI platform's own ranking systems.
