5 pillars. 100 total points. 4 tiers. The same scorecard powers the free public audit and the work we do for clients — there is no "secret" tier.
Every audited site is scored across 5 pillars. Each pillar is worth a maximum of 20 points. The total (100 points) maps to one of 4 tiers below.
Within each pillar, the engine evaluates concrete, binary signals — schema present or absent, llms.txt valid or not, lastmod dates varied or always-today. No subjective grading. Disqualifiers (broken canonicals, malformed JSON-LD, etc.) deduct points AFTER the pillar total.
Every signal we check, every penalty we apply, and every tier you can land in is spelled out on this page. We run the same audit on our own website — our score lives at /aao/score. It's whatever the tool gave us this month, not a number we picked.
Where your score lands tells you whether agents can see you, read you, or recommend you.
| Tier | Score range | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Foundation | 0–40 | Functionally invisible to AI agents. |
| Developing | 41–60 | Partial signals — agents can find you, but not understand you. |
| Competitive | 61–80 | Ahead of most. Vulnerable to the next competitor that figures it out. |
| Dominant | 81–100 | Top tier. Maintenance, not catch-up, is what matters now. |
Click any pillar to read the deep dive. Each links to its own page with the full signal list and common findings.
Structured data is JSON-LD on every page describing what each page is about — Organization, Product, Service, FAQPage, Article, BreadcrumbList. AI agents extract facts from this markup before they ever read your human-readable copy. Without it, you are invisible to them.
Content Clarity scores how easily an AI agent can lift a clean, self-contained answer out of your page. Semantic HTML, clear heading hierarchy, FAQ blocks, and short answer paragraphs win citations. Walls of marketing prose lose to competitors who structured their answers.
API Compatibility is the set of machine-readable surfaces that let agents index, talk to, and transact with your site without scraping it. A well-formed llms.txt, a fresh sitemap.xml, RSS feeds, and clean public endpoints are the foundation. On top of that, three 2026 cross-platform standards have emerged that AI agents from OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Anthropic are aligning around: A2A AgentCard for agent-to-agent discovery, Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) for AI-driven checkout, and WebMCP for runtime tool registration in Chrome. Sites that implement these are visible to the agentic web; sites that don't are invisible to it.
Brand Reputation measures the reputation signals an agent can extract directly from your site: AggregateRating schema backed by a real rating and review count, an Organization.sameAs array linking to your social and industry-directory profiles, a portfolio or case-study page with named clients, and outcome metrics expressed as numbers (not adjectives). Agents weight self-declared authority heavily — but only when it's machine-readable.
Freshness is the set of signals that tell an agent your content is current. Last-modified dates that vary realistically, content velocity (new posts, updates), refreshed pricing, recent reviews. Agents prefer fresh answers; a stale site gets passed over for a fresher competitor even when the fresher one is less authoritative.
Run the methodology against your site. Free, 60 seconds, no credit card.
Free AAO Audit