We grade a website A to F for AI visibility by checking how easily an AI answer engine can read, understand, and quote it. An A means the full text of the page is present the moment it loads, the important facts are marked up so a machine can parse them, and real questions are answered in short, plain sentences; an F means the content only appears after code runs in the visitor’s browser, so an AI assistant sees a nearly blank page and moves on.
AI visibility is a different question from where you rank on Google. When someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google’s AI Overviews for a recommendation, the assistant reads a handful of pages and writes an answer in its own words, often quoting one of them directly. If your site is easy to read and clearly organized, you are more likely to be the page it quotes. If it is not, you are invisible to that conversation, no matter how good your product is. Our grade is a plain, honest score for how ready your site is to be read and cited.
What we actually check
The grade comes from four things, each of which you can see and fix.
1. Is the content there before the browser does any work
This is the single biggest factor. Most AI crawlers do not run the code that builds a page in your browser. They request the page, read whatever text comes back in that first response, and leave. Vercel’s analysis of real crawler traffic found that the major AI crawlers download JavaScript but do not execute it (Vercel). If your product descriptions, prices, and answers only appear after that code runs, an assistant sees an empty shell (Lantern). Google is the exception: its crawler can run the code, though it does so on a delay (Google Search Central). An A-grade site delivers its full text up front, so every reader, human or machine, gets the whole page immediately.
2. Are the important facts labeled
Structured data is a small, invisible layer that tells a machine what a piece of text is — this is a price, this is a question, this is a review, this is a business address. It turns a wall of words into clearly labeled facts. Pages that use it tend to be understood and reused more reliably by AI systems, because the assistant does not have to guess (Frase). An A-grade site labels its key facts; an F-grade site leaves the machine guessing.
3. Is the question answered in the first two sentences
Answer engines quote self-contained answers. If a visitor’s question is answered plainly at the top of a page, in a sentence that makes sense on its own, that sentence is easy to lift. Buried answers, or answers that only make sense after three paragraphs of setup, are hard to quote and usually skipped. The practical sweet spot for a quotable answer is roughly 40 to 80 words — enough to carry the point, short enough to sit in a single quote (ZipTie).
4. Is there a real FAQ, marked up as one
A frequently asked questions section is a natural fit for how people talk to AI, because it pairs a real question with a short answer. Google retired the FAQ rich result in Search in 2026, so you no longer get an extra snippet for it (Google Search Central). But the markup still helps AI tools read and match your answers, which is why we keep grading for it.
What an A looks like, and what an F looks like
An A-grade site reads like this: the whole page arrives as plain text, the prices and questions and business details are labeled, each page answers its main question in the first breath, and there is a genuine FAQ. Ask an assistant about that business and its own words come back.
An F-grade site is the opposite: a near-empty first response, no labeling, answers scattered halfway down long pages, and no FAQ. It may look perfectly good to a human visitor and still be unreadable to the tools more and more people now ask first. Most sites we grade land somewhere in between — a B or a C — with two or three specific fixes standing between them and an A.
Frequently asked questions
Is AI visibility the same as SEO?
No. Traditional SEO is about ranking on a results page; AI visibility is about being readable and quotable by an assistant that writes its own answer. They overlap — clear, well-labeled content helps both — but a site can rank on Google and still be blank to ChatGPT, because Google can run page code that other crawlers cannot.
Does my grade change over time?
Yes. Every time you publish content, change a theme, or add a plugin, the grade can move. We re-check on a schedule so you see the current picture, not a snapshot from launch day.
Will fixing my grade hurt my normal Google rankings?
No. The same things that make a page readable to AI — full text up front, labeled facts, clear answers — also help ordinary search. You are not trading one for the other.
Do I need to be a large brand to get an A?
No. The grade measures how your pages are built and written, not how famous you are. A small local business with a clean, well-organized site can score higher than a large company with a slow, code-heavy one.
What is the fastest way to raise a low grade?
Make sure your full page text loads up front, add a short answer to the top of each key page, and publish a real FAQ. Those three changes move most sites the furthest, the fastest.
If you would like to see your own site’s grade and the specific fixes behind it, take a look at the platform.