AI ReadinessEverything we check when we ask: can an AI engine find this site, understand it, trust it, and quote it?

AI readiness is a measure of whether an AI answer engine can find a site, understand it, trust it, and quote it accurately. It covers five things: crawl access for AI user agents, typed facts in structured data, a legible entity behind the brand, passages that lift cleanly into an answer, and third-party corroboration. A site that ranks well on Google can still be AI-unready if its facts are implied rather than stated, or if its crawlers are blocked.

Fifty-nine checks across nine weighted categories: Foundations (15), Crawl and AI policy (10), Machine-readable surfaces (15), Structured data and entity markup (15), Entity and About page (15), Content extractability (12), Trust and security (8), Off-site corroboration (5), and Measurement (5). Each check is worth an equal share of its category weight, so the total is out of 100. An optional advanced-discovery track adds up to 10 bonus points. The score is an index that shows where the next hour of work buys the most visibility, not a grade.

AI answers are largely entity answers. When a model needs to describe who a company is, how long it has operated, who runs it, and whether it is durable, the About page is the densest concentration of those facts on the domain — stated in prose with dates, names, and specifics. On one enterprise brand site the About page drew five times the Gen AI impressions of the homepage in Google Search Console. A tight 1,200-word About page with a dated timeline and named leadership beats a 4,000-word page of adjectives.

No. AEO Engine does not recommend shadow markdown clones, hidden text written for AI, or LLM-only pages. No major AI vendor has asked for them, they fragment the entity, and they are trivially gameable. The strongest AI visibility asset is usually a page that would pass an editor review: comprehensive, specific, well-organized, current, and clearly owned by a named, credible entity. Machine-readable files like llms.txt are a convenience index, not a substitute for a readable page.

Fix access first. A single 200 at a stable HTTPS URL, an explicit AI crawler policy in robots.txt, and core pages that render their main content in the initial HTML clear the P0 blockers that cap every other gain. Then add Organization and AboutPage markup with true foundingDate, founder, and sameAs values, and rewrite the About page with a dated timeline and named leadership. Those three moves usually move a score further than any content expansion.

No. AI readiness sits on top of technical SEO. Crawlability, canonical discipline, titles, internal linking and Core Web Vitals are the same substrate. What changes is the emphasis: typed facts over implied ones, entity depth over keyword coverage, self-contained quotable passages over long narrative intros, and off-site corroboration over link volume alone. Sites with solid SEO fundamentals typically start this review with most of the Foundations category already passing.

Re-run quarterly, and again after any platform migration, theme change, WAF or bot-management change, or major content restructure. AI vendors change crawler user agents and answer surfaces frequently, so a policy written a year ago may not match current behaviour. Keep the prompt-level citation panel on a fixed schedule so each run compares against a baseline rather than a memory.