Before an AI assistant can name your brand, it must be able to reach, read and understand your content. The AI Readiness Score is a maturity level that shows how well a website is prepared for AI search technically, structurally, in terms of content and trust. It is a scoring model, not an official industry standard.Open glossary entry → describes these prerequisites, from technical accessibility to content that is good enough to be cited.

The key levers #

  • Reachability do not block AI crawlers are automated bots that fetch web pages for AI providers in order to find content, make it available for search functions, retrieve it for answers, or, depending on the provider, use it for model training.Open glossary entry → and keep key pages Indexing is the step in which a search engine processes crawled content and decides whether a URL is added to the search index. Only indexed pages can appear in search results.Open glossary entry →.
  • Readability serve important content directly in HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is the markup language for web pages. It defines the structure and content of a page, such as headings, paragraphs, links and images.Open glossary entry → and use clean Semantic HTML means using HTML elements according to their meaning, such as <main> for the main content or <nav> for navigation, instead of building everything from generic <div> containers.Open glossary entry →.
  • Citation readiness provide clear facts, questions with a direct answer, tables and source references.

What is llms.txt? #

llms.txt is a voluntary Markdown file in a website's root directory that gives language models a compact overview of important content. It is a proposal or de facto format, not a binding official web standard.Open glossary entry → is a text file in the root directory of a domain. It is meant to point AI systems to relevant content. So far no AI system is proven to read it. An A Large Language Model (LLM) is an AI model that learns from large amounts of text and generates formulated answers from it. LLMs form the core of generative answer systems such as ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini.Open glossary entry →.txt does no harm, but it does not replace a clean website structure. That is why RankScan does not count it.

How RankScan helps #

RankScan checks on every Crawling is the process by which a search engine bot fetches a URL and downloads its content. It is the first step before a page can be indexed.Open glossary entry → whether AI assistants can read your website: whether The robots.txt is a publicly accessible text file in a site's root directory. It tells crawlers which URLs they may fetch and therefore controls crawling.Open glossary entry → allows AI bots, whether pages are indexable, whether there is a An XML sitemap is a machine-readable file listing a website's important URLs. It helps search engines discover content more efficiently but does not replace internal linking or guarantee indexing.Open glossary entry →, whether content is readable without JavaScript and whether the home page has Organization schema describes a company or organisation as an entity, with details such as name, URL, logo, address, contact and official profiles.Open glossary entry →. Anything missing appears as a measure.