How to Improve Your AI-Readiness Score
If you’ve run a scan and got your AI-readiness score, the next question is: what should you fix first?
This guide is a prioritized checklist you can apply to almost any website (marketing site, docs, SaaS, e-commerce).
TL;DR (priority order)
- Fix crawl and index signals (broken pages,
robots.txt, sitemap, canonical).
- Make key pages quotable (clear headings, definitions, short answers).
- Add structured data (Schema.org via JSON-LD).
- Improve internal linking (no orphan pages; build topic clusters).
- Iterate with measurement (scan again, monitor logs).
Want a quick baseline? Scan your site.
What your score represents
Your AI-readiness score (0–100) is a proxy for how well AI systems can:
- Crawl and fetch your pages
- Extract the main content (not only navigation)
- Understand entities and relationships (who/what/where)
- Summarize your content accurately
A higher score tends to correlate with:
- More accurate brand representation in AI answers
- Better odds of being cited or linked
- Fewer “hallucinated” details about your product
1) Fix crawlability and indexability basics
Before rewriting content, make sure bots can actually access and interpret it.
Quick checks
- Important pages return
200 (not 404, not redirect chains).
- You publish an XML sitemap and keep it up to date.
- Your canonical URLs are consistent.
- Private areas are protected with authentication. (For search engines,
robots.txt is not a reliable way to keep a URL out of the index.)
robots.txt: allow what should be public
Different AI systems use different tokens. A minimal allow example might look like:
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: /
If you need a deeper explanation of who is crawling and why, read: Understanding AI Crawlers.
2) Make key pages easy for AI (and humans) to understand
AI systems do best when your content is explicit and scannable.
Make pages “quotable”
For your key pages (home, product, pricing, docs, FAQ):
- Start with a 1–2 sentence summary that answers “What is this?”
- Define core terms (avoid internal jargon)
- Use descriptive H2/H3 headings
- Prefer lists and short paragraphs over long walls of text
Add trust signals
- Author and date on articles
- Clear company identity (About / Contact)
- Sources and references when you make non-obvious claims
3) Add structured data (Schema.org)
Structured data helps machines interpret:
- Your organization
- Your site and main navigation
- Article content (author, date, headline)
- FAQs
Start simple with Organization and WebSite, then expand by page type.
Guide: Structured Data for AI: A Practical Guide.
4) Build internal links and topic clusters
AI assistants (and search engines) use internal links to infer topical authority.
Practical approach:
- Choose 3–5 core topics (e.g., AI-readiness, structured data, AI crawlers, technical SEO).
- Create one “hub” article per topic.
- Link supporting posts back to the hub with descriptive anchor text.
In this blog, a simple cluster is:
5) Monitor and iterate
Use friendly4AI to track changes over time:
- Re-scan after meaningful updates
- Focus on the lowest-scoring parameters first
- Validate fixes by checking logs (crawl activity) and site health dashboards
Common mistakes (and what to do instead)
- Trying to hide pages with
robots.txt
Use authentication or noindex where appropriate.
- Thin pages with generic marketing copy
Add specifics: features, constraints, definitions, examples.
- Broken internal links and orphan pages
Build a consistent internal link structure.
Start improving today
Pick one item from the checklist and ship it today. Then scan again to see the impact.
AI-readiness is a continuous improvement loop: crawlability → clarity → structure → measurement.