Scoring System
Grade Classifications
Your AEO Score (0-100) is interpreted using the same five bands as the analyzer:
6 Analysis Dimensions
Your AEO Score is calculated from 6 weighted dimensions, each evaluating different aspects of AI optimization:
What it measures: Infrastructure, security, crawlability, indexation status, robots.txt and sitemap, canonical targets, pages that say "not found" but answer 200, snippet controls (noindex, nosnippet), HTTPS
Why it matters: Without a solid technical foundation, AI systems cannot properly crawl and index your content
What it measures: HTML hierarchy, Schema.org structured data and whether it matches the visible page, semantic HTML5 tags, heading structure, question-based content
Why it matters: Clear structure helps AI systems understand content relationships and context
What it measures: E-E-A-T signals (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust), content clarity, depth, semantic richness
Why it matters: AI systems prioritize high-quality, authoritative content for citations and recommendations
What it measures: Page speed from PageSpeed lab data: TTFB, First Contentful Paint, Total Blocking Time, Speed Index, JavaScript execution time and render-blocking resources. Without PageSpeed data it is not measured and the other dimensions are re-weighted.
Why it matters: Fast pages serve visitors well and are fetched reliably; speed is not an AI citation threshold
What it measures: Image optimization, alt text quality, media accessibility, visual content AI-readiness
Why it matters: Well-optimized media enhances AI understanding and improves accessibility for all users
What it measures: Which AI crawlers may open your pages (search, user fetch and training are judged separately), AI-readable summaries, claim attribution and content dating. Several signals here, such as llms.txt and entity links, are unproven: they are shown but not scored.
Why it matters: AI search and assistants can only use pages their crawlers are allowed to open, and clear, attributed content is easier to quote correctly
Score Calculation
Your AEO Score is a weighted average of all dimension scores:
AEO Score = (Technical × 0.15) + (Structural × 0.15) + (Content × 0.25)
+ (Performance × 0.10) + (Media × 0.15) + (AI-Specific × 0.20)
Each dimension score is the weighted average of its checks. A check counts by its importance within the dimension (the same whether it passes or fails) multiplied by how well the evidence supports it, as explained below. Checks that do not apply to your page, or that we could not test, are left out rather than counted as passes or failures.
When a dimension has nothing to weigh (no check could be measured, or every measured check is unproven), it is shown as not measured, never as 0, and the other dimension weights are scaled up so that they still add to 100%. Without Performance data, for example, Content counts for about 27.8% instead of 25%.
How Checks Are Weighted
Every check is tied to research on search engines and AI answers. How much that research supports a check decides how much it counts in your score:
| Evidence level | Counts as | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Official | × 1.0 | Stated by the search or AI engine itself |
| Corroborated | × 1.0 | Confirmed by several independent sources or measurements |
| Practitioner advice | × 0.5 | Common advice from practitioners that the engines have not confirmed |
| Unproven | × 0.0 | Plausible but not shown to matter. Labelled "unproven — not scored" in the report and left out of the score |
An unproven check is still run and shown, so you can decide whether it suits your site, but it never lowers or raises your score and it is not ranked in "What to do next".
AI crawler access is judged by purpose
The AI Bot Permissions check reads your robots.txt the way crawlers do and sorts AI crawlers by what they are for. Search crawlers (such as OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Claude-SearchBot, Bingbot and Googlebot) and user-fetch crawlers (ChatGPT-User, Perplexity-User, Claude-User) decide whether AI search and assistants can open your page: blocking one on the scanned page fails the check. Training crawlers (such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot, CCBot and Google-Extended) are your policy choice: blocking them never fails the check, and it does not hide your page from AI search. You do not need to allow every AI bot.
Improving Your Score
Your site dashboard ranks the fixes for you under "What to do next": worst severity first, then how well the evidence supports the check, then how many pages it fails on. Each fix says who usually does it and how big it is, and you can download the list as developer tickets (Markdown or CSV). Use the Priority Matrix below to plan the rest:
- Let AI search crawlers fetch your pages (robots.txt)
- Add missing meta descriptions
- Remove accidental noindex or nosnippet settings
- Fix missing alt text
- Implement Schema.org markup
- Improve E-E-A-T signals
- Restructure content hierarchy
- Answer your customers' real questions on the page
- Optimize image file sizes
- Add Open Graph tags
- Implement breadcrumb navigation
- Minor CSS optimizations
- Decorative image alt text
- Third-party widget issues