HTTP Reachability

What this parameter measures

Does the target page return a successful HTTP response? friendly4AI fetches your URL, follows redirects, and reads the status code on the final URL. A response of exactly 200 OK passes; anything else fails. It is the most fundamental prerequisite in the scan: every other Crawlability and content check runs against the page this fetch returns.

Why it matters for AI-readiness

AI crawlers expect standard HTTP responses, and a non-200 status stops them cold. GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and ChatGPT-User all need a 200 OK to read your content; a 403 Forbidden, a 404 Not Found, a 503 Service Unavailable, or a redirect loop that ends on an error page means no AI system can fetch, summarize, or cite the page. If the page is unreachable, nothing downstream can be evaluated — no robots.txt rule, no structured data, and no metadata can rescue a page the crawler never received.

How we score it

Under the v4.4 methodology, this Crawlability parameter is a binary check with no partial tier. friendly4AI records the HTTP status code of the final URL after following redirects: a status of exactly 200 scores pass (100), and any other outcome (a non-200 status code, an unreachable host, or a connection timeout) scores fail (0). The scan also captures the final URL and response time as evidence, but only the status code determines pass or fail. Because the check is pass/fail, the borderline is a single value: 200 versus everything else.

How to fix common issues

• Confirm the page returns 200 OK for an anonymous request — test with curl -I https://yourdomain.com and check the final status line.
• Resolve redirect chains that end on an error page; make sure every 301/302 lands on a live 200 URL.
• Remove blanket bot blocking at the CDN or WAF layer that returns 403/429 to non-browser user agents — AI crawlers identify themselves and need a real response.
• Fix 5xx errors and provisioning gaps so the origin stays up during the scan window.
• Re-scan after any infrastructure or DNS change to confirm the page is still reachable.