How the score works
AISeeWhy tests whether AI crawlers and AI search can read and cite a web page. Everything that affects the score is on this page.
The formula
Score = 100 − 15 × (P1 findings) − 6 × (P2 findings) − 2 × (P3 findings), never below 0. A page is marked visible to AI when the score is 70 or more and there is no P1 finding.
Priorities
- P1, critical: AI search or AI assistants cannot read the page, or cannot trust what it says.
- P2, important: the page is harder to understand, find or cite.
- P3, nice to have, or a policy choice such as blocking crawlers that collect training data.
What is tested
- The page is fetched as 16 AI and search crawlers, as curl and as a desktop browser, with each crawler's published user agent. A crawler that gets an error, a challenge or a different page than the browser is reported with the HTTP status and the firewall's signature.
- robots.txt is parsed by RFC 9309 for every crawler token, including tokens that are never sent as user agents (Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended).
- The page's structured data (JSON-LD), answer-first content, dates, sitemaps, hreflang alternates and llms.txt are checked.
- A crawler that hits a temporary failure (network error, 429, 5xx) is retried once before it counts.
Limits of an external test
- Requests come from AISeeWhy's server, not from the crawler owners' IP addresses. A firewall that trusts real crawlers by IP may block us but let them in, and the reverse. The server-log check shows how the real crawlers were answered.
- JavaScript is not run, because AI crawlers do not run it.
- One URL is one page. Use bulk audits or a sitemap for a whole site.
- A better score means fewer technical barriers. It does not guarantee that an AI assistant will mention or cite you.
Rules
Current rules version: 2026.11. The version changes whenever a rule, a priority or the formula changes, and every report shows the version it was made with.