How to Improve Your AI-Readiness Score

So you've scanned your site and the score isn't what you hoped for. We get it. We've been there with our own site too.

The good news: most issues we see are fixable in a few hours, not weeks. After analyzing thousands of sites, we've noticed the same problems come up again and again. This guide covers what actually moves the needle.

Where to start

If you're short on time, here's our recommended order:

1. Crawl basics — can bots even access your pages?
2. Quotable content — can AI pull a clear answer from your text?
3. Structured data — help machines understand who you are
4. Internal links — connect your content into clusters
5. Measure and repeat — scan again, see what changed

Not sure where you stand? Scan your site first.

What the score actually tells you

Think of your score (0–100) as a rough proxy for how easily AI can work with your site. It's not magic. It checks whether AI systems can:

• Actually reach your pages (you'd be surprised how often they can't)
• Pull out the real content, not just your nav and footer
• Figure out what you do and who you are
• Summarize you without making stuff up

We've seen sites go from 40 to 75+ after a weekend of fixes. The payoff? When someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity about your product category, you're more likely to show up—and show up accurately, not as some hallucinated version of yourself.

Want to check if AI assistants already mention you? Learn about AI Visibility—a complementary metric that measures whether LLMs actually recommend your site. To understand the mechanics behind AI recommendations, see How LLMs Choose Which Websites to Recommend.

1) Fix crawlability first (seriously)

This sounds obvious, but we see it constantly: sites block AI crawlers without realizing it, then wonder why they're invisible to AI search.

Before touching anything else, check these:

• HTTP status codes — your key pages should return 200, not redirect chains or soft 404s
• Sitemap — publish one, keep it updated, don't let it get stale
• Canonicals — pick one URL per page and stick with it
• Auth for private stuff — don't rely on robots.txt to hide things; it's a suggestion, not a lock

robots.txt: the part everyone gets wrong

Different AI systems use different crawler names, and if you've copied some generic robots.txt from 2015, you might be blocking half of them.

A simple "allow everything public" setup looks like this:

User-agent: GPTBot
Allow: /

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /

User-agent: ClaudeBot
Allow: /

User-agent: Claude-SearchBot
Allow: /

User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /

User-agent: Google-Extended
Allow: /

Want to know what each of these bots actually does? We wrote a whole piece on it: Understanding AI Crawlers.

2) Make your content quotable

AI doesn't read your page top-to-bottom like a human might. It's scanning for fragments it can use—definitions, answers, facts.

We call this "quotability." Can an AI pull a clean 2-sentence answer from your page? If your homepage is all vibes and no substance, the answer is no.

What works

For pages that matter (home, product, pricing, docs):

• Lead with the answer — "What is this?" should be answered in the first two sentences
• Define your terms — if you invented a word, explain it
• Use real headings — not clever ones, descriptive ones
• Break up walls of text — AI (and humans) skim

Trust signals matter more than you think

AI systems are getting better at evaluating source credibility. We've noticed pages with clear authorship and dates tend to get cited more often than anonymous content.

• Put a real author name and date on articles
• Have an actual About page that says who you are
• If you claim something non-obvious, link to a source

3) Add structured data (yes, it still matters)

You might think Schema.org is just for Google rich snippets. It's not—AI systems use it too, especially to understand:

• Who runs this site (Organization)
• What the site is about (WebSite, WebPage)
• Who wrote what and when (Article)
• Common questions and answers (FAQPage)

Our advice: start with Organization and WebSite on every page. Add Article to blog posts. Don't overthink it—basic structured data beats none.

We cover this in detail here: Structured Data for AI: A Practical Guide.

4) Connect your content (internal linking)

Orphan pages are invisible pages. If nothing links to your best content, AI has no way to find it or understand that it matters.

This is how we think about it:

1. Pick your core topics — for us, it's AI-readiness, crawlers, structured data
2. Create hub pages — one comprehensive article per topic
3. Link everything back — supporting posts should point to the hub with real anchor text, not "click here"

Here's an example from this blog:

• What is AI-readiness? — the hub
• Understanding AI Crawlers — links back
• Structured Data for AI — links back

5) Measure, fix, repeat

We learned this the hard way: you can't improve what you don't measure.

After making changes:

• Re-scan — did your score actually go up?
• Check the details — which parameters are still dragging you down?
• Watch your logs — are AI crawlers actually hitting your pages now?

Don't expect perfection on the first pass. We've iterated on our own site dozens of times.

Mistakes we see all the time

After reviewing thousands of scans, these come up constantly:

Using robots.txt as a security tool It's not. Bots can ignore it. If something should be private, put it behind auth.

Landing pages with zero substance "We help businesses succeed" tells AI nothing. Add specifics—what exactly do you do, for whom, with what constraints.

Orphan pages nobody can find If your best content isn't linked from anywhere, it might as well not exist. Audit your internal links.

Start somewhere

You don't need to fix everything at once. Pick one thing from this list, ship it today, and scan again tomorrow.

We've watched sites jump 10-15 points from a single afternoon of work. The trick is starting.

Fix, measure, repeat. That's the whole game.