What we check, and why

What we look for. Your robots.txt, checked against the crawlers that decide whether an assistant can cite you: OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT, Claude-SearchBot and Claude-User for Claude, and PerplexityBot.

Why it matters. This is the gate, which is why it carries the most points. Block these and nothing else on this page matters: that assistant simply never sees your site. Blocking the training crawlers - GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended - is a different decision and costs nothing here; each company says plainly that it does not affect being cited.

What we look for. How much of your visible text is in the HTML we receive, versus only appearing after JavaScript runs.

Why it matters. Most AI crawlers don't run scripts. If your copy is assembled in the browser, they see an empty shell. A beautiful site can be completely invisible this way, and nothing in your analytics will tell you.

What we look for. Structured data for your organisation and site, whether the types suit what you actually are, and whether any of it is broken.

Why it matters. This is how you state facts - who you are, what you sell, your address - in a form a machine cannot misread. Broken markup scores worse than none, because a tool that tries to read it gets an error instead.

What we look for. Where the substance sits on the page: near the top, or after a long run-up.

Why it matters. Assistants quote the part that answers the question. Pages that open with scene-setting give them nothing to lift, so they quote a competitor who answered in the first sentence.

What we look for. Contact details in any country's format, named people, and links to profiles that can be checked independently - a company register, LinkedIn, a maps listing, Trustpilot or Yelp.

Why it matters. Assistants are cautious about recommending businesses they can't verify. Address, email and an outside profile move you from 'a website' to 'a company that exists'.

What we look for. Content shaped as questions and answers, in headings and structured data.

Why it matters. The single most quotable format there is. A question-shaped heading matches a question-shaped prompt, which is how most people talk to an assistant.

What we look for. Real lists and tables where the content suits them, rather than the same information buried in prose.

Why it matters. Machines extract from structure far more reliably than from paragraphs. A price list as a table gets quoted accurately; the same prices in a sentence get mangled or skipped.

What we look for. Machine-readable dates on your pages, and whether the copyright line has been left behind.

Why it matters. Given two equally good sources, an assistant prefers the one it can tell is maintained. An undated page looks like it might be from 2016.

What we look for. A file at /llms.txt handing AI tools a plain summary of the site, and whether it's signposted.

Why it matters. Newer and not yet universal, so it's worth only a few points - but it lets you write the description of your business rather than leaving an assistant to infer one.

What we look for. How many links each page makes to other pages on the same site.

Why it matters. Links are how a machine works out which of your pages matter and how your topics relate. A page nothing links to reads as an afterthought.

What we look for. Whether the page declares a language, and whether the spelling matches what it declared.

Why it matters. It costs nothing and removes a guess. We check consistency, not nationality - American English on a site that declares American English is exactly right.

What we look for. noindex tags and robots.txt rules that hide pages from search engines.

Why it matters. The most expensive mistake on this list, and the most common after a site launch - a staging setting shipped to production hides the whole site, and everything else becomes moot.

What we look for. Certificate validity, and whether anything still loads over plain HTTP.

Why it matters. Browsers label unencrypted pages 'Not Secure', which turns visitors away before they read a word. It is also a long-standing ranking signal.

What we look for. Written descriptions on images, heading order, and a declared page language.

Why it matters. The same things that help a screen reader help a crawler: both are reading your page without seeing it. Accessibility and machine readability are mostly the same work.

What we look for. Whether a sitemap exists, and whether the URLs in it are real and current.

Why it matters. A tidy list of your pages makes discovery faster and more complete. A sitemap full of dead URLs is worse than none - it teaches crawlers to distrust it.

What we look for. Response timing, page weight and redirect overhead, measured at the moment of the scan.

Why it matters. Honest proxy signals, not a lab measurement - we say so on the report. Slow responses cost you rankings and cost you visitors who don't wait.

What we look for. Titles and descriptions: present, unique to the page, and a sensible length.

Why it matters. Your title is the headline in every search result and often the label an assistant gives you. Duplicated titles make pages compete with each other instead of ranking.

What we look for. Viewport declaration, tap target spacing and layout signals in the markup.

Why it matters. Google indexes the mobile version of your site, not the desktop one. If the phone version is the poor relation, that's the version being judged.

What we look for. How many clicks from the homepage each scanned page sits at.

Why it matters. Pages buried five levels down get crawled rarely and rank poorly. Depth is a decent proxy for what a site treats as important.

What we look for. How many forwarding hops sit between the URL asked for and the page returned.

Why it matters. Every hop costs time and leaks a little ranking signal. Chains build up quietly over years of site changes and nobody notices.

What we look for. Canonical tags, and in particular any pointing at a different domain.

Why it matters. A canonical aimed at someone else's site hands them the credit for your page. It is nearly always a copy-paste accident, and an expensive one.

What we look for. A sample of the links on your pages, followed to see they load, and whether a page that doesn't exist correctly says so.

Why it matters. Dead links waste a visitor who was already interested, and block search engines from the pages behind them. The subtler half is the missing page that answers "fine" instead of "not found" - search engines then index pages that were never real, and nobody notices for years.

What we look for. Open Graph and Twitter card tags on the homepage, and whether the preview image actually loads.

Why it matters. This decides what people see when your address is pasted into WhatsApp, LinkedIn or Slack. Without it a link is a bare grey line of text; with a broken image it is worse. It costs three tags and is almost always left out.

What we look for. hreflang annotations, whether the codes are valid, whether each has an address, and whether there is an x-default.

Why it matters. Only relevant if you publish in more than one language - a single-language site passes without needing anything. Where they are used and wrong, search engines ignore them entirely and show the wrong language to the wrong country.

What we look for. Word counts and near-duplicate pages across the site.

Why it matters. Thin and duplicated pages give neither a visitor nor an assistant anything to take away, and dilute the pages that do.