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Your AI Readiness score (out of 100) is how well your website itself is set up to be understood by AI, measured from the site alone. It is composed of five site signals. Your Footprint score (out of 100) is a separate off-site score, scored beside Readiness and never inside it. Neither score is a percentage of AI recommendations: the headline measure of whether AI names you is the named share.

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The five Readiness signals

Citability (quotable content)

Checks how quotable and self-contained your content is. AI answers are assembled from passages an engine can lift cleanly into a response. Thin, vague or promotional copy gives the model nothing useful.Work on it: answer real buyer questions directly, lead with the conclusion, use headings and lists, and back claims with specifics.

E-E-A-T (trust and credibility)

Checks Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness signals on your site: who is behind the business, a real About page, visible contact details and provenance.Work on it: name your people and their credentials, show how you know what you claim, and make it obvious you are a real, contactable operation.

Technical (site health)

Checks whether AI crawlers can cleanly access and read your site: HTTPS, sitemaps, canonical URLs and content served in the initial HTML.Work on it: serve content in the initial HTML response, keep the site fast and crawlable, and fix the underlying plumbing. If content only appears after JavaScript runs, most AI crawlers never see it.

Schema (machine-readable business facts)

Checks structured data (JSON-LD) such as Organization and LocalBusiness that states what you are, where you operate and what you offer in machine-readable form.Work on it: add valid Organization and LocalBusiness JSON-LD with sameAs links to your verified profiles, and deliver it in the server HTML. Most AI crawlers read raw HTML and do not run JavaScript.

Platform (AI-ready setup)

Checks your published crawler permission in robots.txt, a published llms.txt, and answer-shaped content.Work on it: publish the crawler permissions you intend, publish an llms.txt, and structure pages as direct answers to the questions buyers ask.

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How the signals combine

  • A signal that could not be verified is left out of Readiness rather than scored zero. Examples: the page could not be read, the site is a JavaScript shell, or robots.txt was unreadable.
  • Because unverified signals are left out, which signals count can differ from scan to scan.
  • Each report states the share each signal carries in that scan’s Readiness score.
Compare Readiness scores over time with the report’s stated shares beside them. A change in which signals could be verified is a change in coverage, not a change in your site.

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Footprint: the off-site score

Footprint (out of 100) covers signals that live off your website:
  • Wikidata and Knowledge Graph entity
  • Google Business Profile
  • Brand mentions
  • Search demand
  • Referring domains
Footprint is scored beside Readiness, not inside it. It is not measured on the free scan, where it shows as not measured rather than zero. The full report measures it. Work on it: keep your name, address and links consistent everywhere, review the sources saved with your answers, and identify relevant places where buyers could find you.

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What these scores do and do not tell you

Site checks explain what to work on. Crawler access, readable content, business facts, structured data and independent mentions are separate checks. They are not extra percentages of AI recommendations, and an older weighted score cannot be converted into a named share. None of these checks guarantees a recommendation, and a change in an answer does not by itself prove which edit caused it.

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Open method

The readiness method and the audit suite are open source at github.com/techhorizonlabs/thl-open. The measurement engine, question sampling and regression eval set are not. For the wider framework, see How we measure whether AI names your business.