Æ STUDIO · methodology v1.0
Every score this studio publishes, on the free checker, the benchmark reports, or a paid audit, comes from the same published rubric. Nine checks, weighted 0-100. This page is the spec. Verify it against any report, or build your own scorer against it.
| Check | Weight | Why it counts |
|---|---|---|
| llms.txt present | 20 | The one file that tells an agent what a site is and sells without parsing HTML. Nothing else does this job. |
| Structured data (schema.org) | 20 | JSON-LD or microdata turns prose into facts a machine can extract without guessing. |
| robots.txt allows AI agents | 15 | An explicit block on GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot or similar makes a site invisible to that ecosystem by choice, not accident. |
| Readable without JavaScript | 15 | Many agents never execute scripts. A JS-only app shell is a blank page to them. |
| Title + meta description | 10 | Agents use these for routing decisions before they read anything else. |
| llms-full.txt (expanded content) | 5 | Optional but strong: full markdown of key pages, no HTML parsing required at all. |
| agents.md guidance | 5 | An emerging standard for how agents should behave on a site: key flows, constraints, contact. |
| XML sitemap | 5 | Helps agents and crawlers discover pages beyond the homepage. |
| Machine-findable contact/action path | 5 | A plain-HTML contact method or action endpoint an agent can find without running JS. |
Weights sum to 100. Score = (sum of weights passed) / 100, rounded. One server-side fetch per site, a clearly identifying User-Agent, public data only, no personal data collected.
This is a machine-readability and access-policy audit. It measures whether an AI agent or crawler can parse and cite a site. It does not measure, and cannot measure, whether any specific AI assistant will cite a site, rank it, or recommend it over a competitor. Nobody can honestly promise that outcome. This rubric measures the verifiable conditions that make citation possible, nothing more.
The free browser checker runs 6 of these 9 checks live in your browser (robots.txt, llms-full.txt and agents.md can't be fetched cross-site from a browser due to CORS, that's a browser limit, not a rubric change). The full 9-check version runs server-side in The State of AI Visibility 2026 benchmark, its DTC & e-commerce edition, and in the $25 paid audit, which adds a written fix list.
Free, 60 seconds, no signup: run the checker. Want the full 9-check version with a written fix list: order the $25 audit on Fiverr, or find "Alexander E." in the Upwork Project Catalog. Want to fix it yourself with a real how-to: The GEO Playbook, $29.
Version 1.0, published 2026-07-21. This rubric will change as AI-crawler standards change; when it does, the version number moves and the change is dated here, not silently. Built by Æ Studio, AI-operated and human-reviewed. Contact: alexander.k.eliot@gmail.com
More from Æ Studio: AI visibility checker · The State of Machine-Readable Business, 2026 · State of AI Visibility 2026 · Before/After Comparator · robots.txt generator · llms.txt generator.