The metric
The AI Says Score™
One score is calculated automatically: the AI Readiness Score, measured from your own website. Here is exactly how it is built, how to read it, and the framework a specialist works from when reviewing your actual visibility across AI platforms.
AI Says audits your website — the foundation every AI platform draws on. To see what ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity or Google AI are saying about you today, our specialists review those platforms directly during a consultation. AI Says is independent and is not connected to any AI platform.
The distinction
Readiness is not visibility
Being easy for an AI system to understand and actually being named in its answers are different claims, measured from different evidence. AI Says never averages them together, and it never reports the second as though it had measured it.
Automated · free · this page
AI Readiness Score
Out of 100, measured entirely from your own website across 32 checks. Every factor is observed: the page was retrieved, the markup was read, the address was either there or it was not. Nothing in it describes an AI platform’s behaviour, so nothing in it has to be estimated.
- 25%
Technical Readiness
Whether AI systems and search crawlers can reach, read and index your pages at all.
- 25%
Entity & Brand Signals
How clearly your site states who you are, what you do and where you operate, in a form machines can extract.
- 20%
Content Authority
Whether there is enough substance and topic coverage for an AI system to treat you as a credible source.
- 20%
Answer Readiness
Whether your content is shaped as answers to the questions customers actually ask.
- 10%
Trust Signals
The proof-of-existence signals — real contact details, a real address, verifiable profiles elsewhere.
Methodology version: AI Says Readiness Methodology v1.0. A factor that could not be tested is removed from both the earned and the available total rather than scored zero.
Step 2 — talk to an expert
The AI visibility model
A framework of 7 components a specialist works through when reviewing what AI platforms actually say about your business, directly on each platform. It is set out here so you can see exactly what a consultation covers and how each part is weighed.
AI Visibility
25%AI Recommendation
20%Brand Accuracy
15%Citations & Authority
15%AEO / Website Readiness
10%Competitive Share
10%AI Sentiment
5%
Framework version: AI Says Scoring Methodology v1.0. Weights describe the relative importance a specialist gives each component when reading platform answers.
Illustrative dial. The band label, not the colour, carries the rating.
How the AI Readiness Score is calculated
The AI Says Score™ in the automated report answers a single question: does this website give AI systems what they need to find, understand, trust and quote this business?
It is points-based. Each of the 32 factors declares its own maximum points and earns some proportion of them from a measured signal, so the arithmetic is auditable line by line. Points are summed inside each of the 5 categories, each category is expressed out of 100, and the categories are combined using the weights above. Nothing is rounded up to flatter a result and nothing is inferred from a model.
A factor that genuinely could not be tested returns Not tested rather than zero, and leaves both the earned and the available total. If your homepage would not respond, the technical category is not scored as though everything failed — it reports that nothing could be measured. That rule exists because “we could not check” and “it is missing” are different findings and only one of them is your fault.
Crucially, the score does not attempt to reverse-engineer any platform’s internal ranking, and it does not predict one. Nobody outside those companies knows their selection rules, and they change. What can be measured — repeatably, identically, with the evidence shown — is your own website.
Scoring architecture
The 5 readiness categories and their weights
Weights are configuration, not code. They are versioned so that a change to the methodology never silently rewrites your history.
| Category | Weight | Checks | What it measures | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Technical Readiness | 25% | 8 | Whether AI systems and search crawlers can reach, read and index your pages at all. | Measured from your website |
| Entity & Brand Signals | 25% | 8 | How clearly your site states who you are, what you do and where you operate, in a form machines can extract. | Measured from your website |
| Content Authority | 20% | 6 | Whether there is enough substance and topic coverage for an AI system to treat you as a credible source. | Measured from your website |
| Answer Readiness | 20% | 6 | Whether your content is shaped as answers to the questions customers actually ask. | Measured from your website |
| Trust Signals | 10% | 4 | The proof-of-existence signals — real contact details, a real address, verifiable profiles elsewhere. | Measured from your website |
| Total | 100% | 32 | Untested factors leave both the earned and the available total. | |
Rating bands
What each score means in practice
Five bands, applied to the AI Readiness Score and used as shared language when a specialist talks through your visibility.
- 85–100
Excellent
AI knows you, describes you accurately and recommends you consistently.
- 70–84
Strong
AI knows your business well, with clear room to be recommended more often.
- 55–69
Moderate
AI has a partial picture of your business and surfaces you inconsistently.
- 40–54
Weak
AI struggles to identify you and rarely includes you in answers.
- 0–39
Critical
AI has little or no usable understanding of your business.
Data confidence is separate — and stays separate
A score of 72 where every factor could be tested and a score of 72 where a third of the site would not respond are not the same claim. Folding confidence into the score would hide that difference behind a single number.
So AI Says reports confidence as its own rating, derived from how much of your site could actually be retrieved and how many factors had to be marked Not tested. Confidence reflects the amount and quality of data available for this assessment. It is shown separately and is never folded into the AI Says Score.
Measured, not tested, not attempted
- Measured
- Read directly from your website at the moment the audit ran, with the evidence shown. Everything in the AI Readiness Score is of this kind.
- Not tested
- The evidence could not be retrieved — a timeout, a block, a page that does not exist. Excluded from the arithmetic, with the reason attached.
- Specialist review
- Anything that depends on what an AI platform says. Rather than estimating it, the audit leaves it to a specialist, who reviews each platform directly.
Step 2 — talk to an expert · human analysis
The 7-component AI visibility model
This is the framework a specialist uses when reviewing what AI platforms say about your business during a consultation. It is set out in full so you can see the basis for that conversation — but nothing on this website computes it, and no score from it appears in your report.
Platform visibility is reviewed by a specialist, directly on each platform, during your consultation — so you get expert interpretation, not just raw output. AI Says is independent and not connected to any AI platform.
| Component | Weight | What a specialist looks at | How it is reviewed |
|---|---|---|---|
| AI Visibility | 25% | How often your business appears when customers ask AI questions in your category. | By a specialist, on the platform |
| AI Recommendation | 20% | How often AI actively recommends you, rather than simply mentioning you. | By a specialist, on the platform |
| Brand Accuracy | 15% | Whether what AI says about your business is correct and complete. | By a specialist, on the platform |
| Citations & Authority | 15% | Whether AI answers cite your website and other credible sources about you. | By a specialist, on the platform |
| AEO / Website Readiness | 10% | Whether your website is structured so AI systems can read and quote it. | By a specialist, on the platform |
| Competitive Share | 10% | Your share of AI answers compared with the competitors you named. | By a specialist, on the platform |
| AI Sentiment | 5% | The tone AI uses when it describes your business. | By a specialist, on the platform |
| Total | 100% | A framework for a conversation, not a figure this website produces. | |
Scope
How to read the score
Every good measurement is clear about what it measures. Here is what your AI Readiness Score is designed to tell you — and where a specialist picks up.
Readiness, then visibility
Being AI-ready doesn’t automatically make you AI-visible — but you can’t become visible without it. A high readiness score means your website gives AI systems what they need. Whether each platform names you today is reviewed on the platforms themselves, in a consultation.
Independent by design
The score is AI Says’ own assessment of your website, separate from any AI provider. Because generative answers vary — the same question asked twice can differ — a stable, repeatable measure of your foundations is the reliable thing to track.
Stronger odds, honestly stated
Acting on every recommendation makes you more findable, more quotable and better corroborated — the conditions answer engines reward. Be wary of anyone who promises a platform will name you; nobody can guarantee that.
The AI Readiness Score is a proprietary readiness assessment developed by AI Says, measured from your website. It is not an official ranking from any AI or search platform, and it does not measure what any AI platform currently says about your business. AI-generated answers vary by platform, model, location, personalisation, prompt wording and time.
AI Says is not affiliated with or endorsed by OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Perplexity or other AI/search providers. Platform names are used descriptively to identify the services being assessed.
The AI Readiness Score measures how well your website is prepared to be understood, trusted and cited by AI-powered search — the foundations you control. It is measured from your website, not from AI platform answers. Readiness is what makes visibility possible; to see your actual visibility on each platform, book a consultation with a specialist.
Methodology version: AI Says Readiness Methodology v1.0. Read the full disclaimer.
Questions
Questions about the score
The automated audit produces the AI Readiness Score, with all 5 categories and every factor behind them, measured entirely from your own website. It is dedicated to readiness: the foundations that determine whether AI systems can find, understand and quote you. Your visibility on individual AI platforms is reviewed separately, by a specialist in a consultation.
Readiness is measured from your website; visibility is measured from what the AI platforms actually say. Readiness covers whether AI systems can reach your site, work out who you are, find substance in it, lift answers from it and verify you elsewhere — every factor observed, which is why it can be automated. Visibility is whether ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity or Google AI name you, describe you accurately, recommend you and cite you, found by asking them and reading the answers. Being AI-ready doesn’t automatically make you AI-visible — but you can’t become visible without it.
Your AI visibility is assessed by a specialist, directly on each platform, during a consultation. They work from the AI visibility model on this page — visibility, recommendation, accuracy, citations, competitive share and sentiment — putting your customers’ real questions to each platform and interpreting the pattern. Your AI Readiness Score gives that review its starting point.
The AI Readiness Score is a proprietary readiness assessment developed by AI Says, independent of any AI or search provider. No provider publishes a ranking for businesses, so the score focuses on something that can be measured precisely: the observable properties of your own website that AI systems rely on.
An untested factor is marked Not tested and removed from both the earned and the available points, so it neither helps nor hurts. It is never scored zero, because “we could not check” is different from “it is missing”. Where several factors are untested, the reported confidence drops so you can see exactly what the score is based on.
Yes — if the website has not changed, the score will be identical. Every factor is measured, the scoring functions are deterministic, and the same signals always produce the same number. That means any change in your score reflects a real change in your website, which makes it a reliable way to track your progress.
The weights follow the order in which machines work: being retrievable and identifiable comes before everything else. Technical Readiness and Entity & Brand Signals carry the most weight for that reason, Content Authority and Answer Readiness follow, and Trust Signals carry the least because they corroborate the rest rather than establish it.
The methodology evolves as AI search matures, and every score records the version it was calculated under so comparisons across versions are always transparent. The current readiness version is AI Says Readiness Methodology v1.0.
See your own AI Readiness Score
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