Answer Readiness
Check whether your content gives clear answers with supporting facts. Each check includes its proof, limits and effect on the score.
answer-readiness/about-credentialsGrade CAdvisoryAbout page with credentials
AI engines crawl your about page to build an organizational authority profile. Without an about page containing team credentials, expertise, and experience details, agents cannot assess your organization's authority, reducing your content's trust score in AI-generated recommendations.
answer-readiness/author-pageGrade CAdvisoryAuthor page exists
AI engines follow author page links to verify credentials and build author expertise profiles. A dedicated author page strengthens E-E-A-T signals.
answer-readiness/author-same-asGrade CAdvisoryAuthor schema with sameAs
AI RAG systems cross-reference author identity across platforms via sameAs URLs. Without external profile links, agents cannot verify author expertise.
answer-readiness/brand-nameGrade CAdvisoryBrand name in body text
AI engines build entity graphs by matching Organization schema names to in-content mentions. If your brand name only appears in schema but not body text, agents cannot associate your content with your entity.
answer-readiness/chunk-boundary-referent-integrityGrade BScoredChunk-boundary referent integrity
Splits the page into heading-led chunks, the way a retriever does, and checks each one for the three ways a chunk loses its meaning when it arrives alone: opening on a demonstrative with no referent, never naming the page's subject, and pointing at a position in the document ("as described above") that a retrieved chunk no longer has.
answer-readiness/comparison-tablesGrade CAdvisoryComparison tables present
AI answer engines extract structured table data to generate comparison answers. Add HTML tables to your content where appropriate.
answer-readiness/content-without-clickthroughGrade BScoredContent answers without click-through
AI answer engines skip teaser content that gates answers behind sign-ups or downloads. Provide substantive answers directly on the page.
answer-readiness/core-open-graphGrade AScoredCore Open Graph tags
Link-preview crawlers — facebookexternalhit and Slack's unfurler are documented by name — read og:title, og:description, og:image and og:url to build the card shown when your page is shared, and Google names og:site_name as one input to the site name on a result. This audit scores those Open Graph properties; the Twitter Card tags it also reports are informational only, because every content-bearing twitter:* tag falls back to its og:* counterpart.
answer-readiness/dates-on-contentGrade AScoredDates on content pages
Date extractors read the byline date off a content page from <time datetime>, JSON-LD datePublished/dateModified, article:*_time meta tags or a clearly labelled visible date; a page carrying none of them has no date any downstream consumer can attach to it. A modification date (or a visible "last updated" label with a date beside it) is the full signal; a publication date alone is a partial one.
answer-readiness/descriptive-urlsGrade CAdvisoryDescriptive URL slugs
AI engines use URL text as a content signal. Descriptive slugs help agents understand page topics before fetching the content.
answer-readiness/direct-definitionsGrade CAdvisoryDefinition markup on definitional pages
HTML-AAM maps <dfn> and <dt>/<dd> to the term and definition roles, and WHATWG requires the definition to sit alongside the term it defines, so the pairing survives extraction intact. No consumer is documented as acting on that mapping, and prose definitions are read perfectly well, so this is reported as upside on pages that already answer a definitional question — never as a defect.
answer-readiness/external-citationsGrade BScoredExternal citations
Linking to authoritative sources signals expertise. AI RAG systems cross-reference your citations to validate claims and assess content quality.
answer-readiness/extractor-survival-recallGrade BScoredExtractor survival recall
Names the spans that carry the page's facts — the `h1`, each section's opening sentences, every `caption`, `dt` and `th`, and the structured-data strings the prose repeats — then runs the page through `@mozilla/readability` and through a Firecrawl/Jina-style stripper and reports which spans did not survive, and what dropped them.
answer-readiness/faq-sectionsGrade CAdvisoryFAQ sections present
AI answer engines like Perplexity extract FAQ-structured content with higher confidence for direct answers. FAQ sections with clear question headings are the top extraction target for "People Also Ask" results and conversational AI responses.
answer-readiness/first-paragraph-answersGrade CAdvisoryFirst paragraph answers primary question
AI search engines score the first paragraph highest for extractive QA. Preamble text like "In this article" or "Welcome" wastes this prime position, causing agents to extract low-value content as your page's representative answer.
answer-readiness/last-modified-schemaGrade BScoredLast modified date in schema
AI engines use dateModified in JSON-LD to determine content freshness. Content that shows recent updates is prioritized over stale content.
answer-readiness/meta-authorGrade CAdvisoryMeta author present
AI agents use the meta author tag to attribute content to a specific person or organization for E-E-A-T scoring. Without it, your content appears authorless, which reduces trust signals in AI ranking systems that prioritize named expertise.
answer-readiness/meta-descriptionGrade BScoredMeta description quality
Google may reproduce <meta name="description"> verbatim as the snippet for a page when it describes the page better than the body text does, and the same snippet pipeline feeds AI Overviews and AI Mode source cards. This audit checks the properties Google documents: the tag is present, it is a usable length, it reads as prose rather than a keyword string, and it actually describes this page.
answer-readiness/named-authorGrade CAdvisoryNamed author attribution
AI systems assign higher confidence to content from named experts. Generic authors like "Staff" or "Admin" reduce trust scoring because agents cannot verify expertise.
answer-readiness/og-image-altGrade CAdvisoryog:image:alt present
AI agents cannot process images directly and rely on og:image:alt text to understand your page's visual content. Without alt text, the OG image is invisible to text-based AI systems that generate answers and summaries about your page.
answer-readiness/og-typeGrade BScoredog:type set and appropriate
AI agents use og:type to classify page content as either a website, article, product, or other entity type. Without it, agents default to treating the page as generic content, missing opportunities for type-specific handling like article freshness scoring.
answer-readiness/publication-dateGrade BScoredPublication date visible
AI engines use visible dates to assess content freshness. Undated content is deprioritized for recency-weighted queries.
answer-readiness/question-headingsGrade CAdvisoryQuestion-formatted headings
AI answer engines directly match user questions to heading text. Question-formatted headings (ending with "?") are the primary signal AI systems use to identify which section answers a specific query.
answer-readiness/review-signalsGrade BScoredReview/testimonial signals
Google parses schema.org Review/AggregateRating to render review rich results, and attributed quotations are the best-measured lever in the GEO literature. This audit passes on machine-readable social proof — review structured data, or quotations carried in <blockquote> with attribution — and warns when review UI is on the page but nothing machine-readable is behind it.
answer-readiness/section-split-risk-profileGrade BScoredSection split-risk profile
Counts each `h2`/`h3` section with a real BPE tokenizer and reports the four ways a page chunks badly: sections over the 512-token window (each producing headless tail chunks), a long page with no headings to cut on, sections too thin to embed distinctly, and single tables or lists whose serialization exceeds the window on its own.
answer-readiness/site-wide-passage-uniqueness-ratioGrade BScoredSite-wide passage uniqueness ratio
Measures two things no single-page check can see: what share of each page’s sentences are its own rather than repeated across its siblings, and which pages are near-duplicates of each other at five-gram Jaccard 0.9 or above. Near-duplicate pages that all name themselves canonical compete against each other for one slot.
answer-readiness/snippet-gate-coverageGrade AScoredSnippet-gate coverage analysis
Computes the site's effective snippet permissions per crawler — merging <meta name="robots">, per-bot meta tags, and X-Robots-Tag response headers — then measures those permissions against the page's actual answer content: is max-snippet numerically smaller than the primary answer span, and does data-nosnippet coverage overlap the answer span, the FAQ answers, or the main-content tables. Reports the specific suppressed text, not just the directive.
answer-readiness/specific-numbersGrade BScoredSpecific numbers and data points
AI engines prefer answers with concrete data points over vague statements. Include specific numbers, percentages, and metrics in your content.
answer-readiness/table-markdown-round-trip-lossGrade BScoredTables survive conversion to markdown
Converts every main-content table to GFM markdown — the representation an answer engine’s reader emits — reads it back, and diffs it cell for cell against the source grid. Reports every cell lost or displaced by coordinate, plus the tables whose numbers carry no header and whose units live only in the caption.
answer-readiness/text-fragment-addressabilityGrade AScoredText-fragment citation addressability
Determines whether a citing surface can construct a working `#:~:text=` deep link to the page's actual answer sentences. Hard-fails on the documented `Document-Policy: force-load-at-top` opt-out header, then simulates the spec's matching algorithm over the parsed DOM to prove each candidate answer span is (a) contained in a single block-level element, (b) unambiguous or disambiguable with a same-block prefix/suffix, and (c) free of characters that break normalization. Outputs the working fragment URLs as a fix artifact.
answer-readiness/trust-signalsGrade BScoredTrust and evidence signals on homepage
A 252,000-trial controlled study across six LLMs (arXiv 2605.25517) measured two page factors that shift which source an AI answer engine cites: quantified social proof (OR 2.14, significant in 4 of 6 models) and claims paired with evidence (OR 2.09, 5 of 6 models). The same study found promotional tone's effect too small and inconsistent to guide, and it named comparison content in its practical implications without measuring it. This audit scores those two page factors and nothing else.
answer-readiness/unique-dataGrade BScoredUnique data or statistics
AI generative engines prioritize content with original, citable data points over vague claims. Include specific statistics and metrics.
answer-readiness/unique-metaGrade CAdvisoryUnique meta per page
AI crawlers use title and description pairs to distinguish between pages. Duplicate meta across pages causes agents to merge or skip content, meaning some of your pages will be invisible in AI-generated answers. Give each page a unique title and description.