Every check behind both scores, explained.
The 25 signals that power the Agent Readiness Score™ and the AEO Readiness Score™ — what each one is, why AI agents and answer engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews) care, the spec it follows, and exactly how to fix it.
17 standards
RFC 8615 defines /.well-known/ as a reserved namespace for site-wide metadata. Agents probe a known set: oauth-authorization-server, openid-configuration, mcp.json, agents.json, api-catalog, etc.
Enumerable list of discrete skills your site exposes — lighter than MCP, heavier than a raw OpenAPI blob. Path: /.well-known/agent-skills/index.json.
Four overlapping standards that let AI agents pay and transact: Agentic Commerce Protocol, Universal Commerce Protocol, Merchant Payments Protocol, x402.
Explicit User-agent rules for AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, etc.) — whether allow or disallow. Demonstrates an intentional posture toward AI traffic.
A robots.txt directive (Content-Signal: search=yes, search-ai=yes, ai-train=no) declaring how your content may be used by search, AI search answers, and AI training.
Every meaningful <img> needs descriptive alt text. Agents rely on alt to understand image content; missing alts hide product photos, screenshots, and diagrams from AI.
A Markdown file at /llms.txt that gives agents a curated, human-edited map of your site's most important content — distinct from a comprehensive sitemap.xml.
When an agent sends Accept: text/markdown, return the same page's content as Markdown — stripped of layout noise, CSS, and JavaScript.
Anthropic's Model Context Protocol manifest. Makes your product natively installable in Cursor, Claude Desktop, and ChatGPT — agents can discover and call your tools without a custom integration.
Meta robots tags (noindex, nosnippet, max-snippet:0) prevent search engines and agents from indexing/quoting your content. Sometimes intentional, sometimes accidental.
Send Link headers on HTML responses to point agents at related resources (sitemap, llms.txt, MCP card, OpenAPI) without requiring them to parse HTML first.
Every crawlable site should publish a robots.txt at the origin root. AI agents read it to learn which paths are allowed and which user-agents are blocked.
Use <h1>-<h6>, <main>, <nav>, <article>, <section> instead of generic <div>s. Agents use heading hierarchy as the spine of their page understanding.
Critical content must be present in the initial HTML response. Most AI crawlers don't execute JavaScript; client-rendered pages return blank to them.
robots.txt should declare your sitemap URL via 'Sitemap: <absolute-url>'. Ensures agents that read robots first can find the sitemap without guessing.
Publish /.well-known/http-message-signatures-directory with a JWKS-like list of public keys you'll accept on signed bot requests. Lets WAFs safely relax rules for verified bots.
An XML sitemap enumerates the URLs you want crawled. Agents prefer to seed their crawl queue from a sitemap rather than guess at links.
2 standards
Buttons should describe the outcome, not the mechanism. 'Start free trial' beats 'Click here'. 'Get a price' beats 'Submit'. Agents parse CTA text to decide what action they're taking on behalf of the user.
Can an agent reach the actions a human visitor would? We check for contact, pricing, signup, login, demo, checkout, docs, and support paths — applicability depends on the site archetype.
6 standards
Can an AI agent answer 'what does this company do, for whom?' from the homepage alone? Vague taglines and inside-baseball jargon make you uncitable.
Articles, blog posts, and news need datePublished + dateModified. Agents discount stale content; explicit freshness dates earn citations on time-sensitive queries.
Company name, logo URL, and sameAs links to LinkedIn / X / GitHub / Wikipedia / Crunchbase should match exactly across schema, footer, and your social profiles.
If you have an FAQ section, mark it up with FAQPage + Question/Answer JSON-LD. Highest-leverage AEO win — directly fuels Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT search citations.
JSON-LD structured data on each major page type — Organization, WebSite, Product, Service, FAQPage, BreadcrumbList, Article, etc. The fastest path to AI Overviews and rich answers.
Customer logos, testimonials, case studies, security badges (SOC 2, ISO 27001), press mentions. Agents weight these heavily when ranking competing answers.