THE RUBRIC
AI / answer-engine readiness (GEO)
Whether an AI answer can lift your content and credit you for it.
Checks 16 12% of 129
Weight 12% of the overall score
Why it is weighted this way
Twelve per cent, and the reason this rubric differs from a conventional SEO audit. Graded on the same scale as everything else, so an unmeasured GEO check is never a pass.
What this category covers
- Whether an answer is extractable from a passage
- llms.txt presence and usefulness
- Answer-engine crawler permissions in robots.txt
- Attribution metadata an engine can cite
- Question-shaped headings
- Server-rendered content availability
Representative checks
A sample of what sits in this category, with how each one is decided and who is allowed to fix it. The full list of 129 lives in the product.
| Check | Method | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| llms.txt present and useful A curated list of what is worth reading, not a dump of every URL. | Rule | Auto |
| Answer extractable from a passage Engines quote passages. A claim buried mid-essay is harder to lift than the same claim under a matching heading. | Model | Assist |
| AI crawlers permitted in robots.txt Blocking them is a valid choice, but it should be a choice. | Rule | Assist |
| Attribution metadata present Author, date, organisation: the things a citation is built from. | Rule | Auto |
What usually goes wrong
- A claim buried mid-essay, where no passage states the answer directly
- A robots.txt permitting Googlebot while silently blocking the answer-engine agents
- No llms.txt, so nothing curates which pages are worth reading
- Anonymous pages with nothing an engine can attribute a quote to
When these checks return unmeasured
A check in this category that cannot run is reported as unmeasured and counted in the denominator. It is never rounded up to a pass, which is the difference between a score that bounds its own claim and one that implies it examined everything.
- The page could not be fetched without JavaScript, so extractability cannot be judged
- A model-judged extractability check could not run
Where to start
- Add a one-sentence direct answer under the main heading of your best pages.
- Check robots.txt for OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and ClaudeBot explicitly.
- Write an llms.txt. It takes about ten minutes.