You have a score out of 100 and seven bars. Here is which of them to fix first.
Your audit gives you an overall score, seven dimensions and a list of fixes — a lot to look at when the only thing you want to know is what to do first. This page explains each score in plain English, what it measures, and which fixes lift it fastest. Read it with your own report open, because the dimensions that matter most differ by sector and your worst number is not automatically your first job. Where a score is a proxy rather than a measured outcome, we say so instead of dressing it up.
Overall Score (X/100)
Your overall score is the average of 7 dimensions. Think of it like a school report card — each dimension is a subject, and your overall score is your GPA.
| Score Range | What It Means |
|---|---|
| 70-100 | Strong AI presence. Your site carries most of the signals we score, and it is likely already being named in AI answers for your industry. |
| 45-69 | Room for improvement. Your site has some AI-friendly elements but is missing key signals. Competitors with higher scores are the ones we see cited. |
| 0-44 | At risk. Your site is mostly invisible to AI search engines. AI models cannot reliably extract or cite your content. Significant gaps need addressing. |
The 7 Dimensions Explained
1. SEO — Traditional Search Optimization
What it checks: Title tags, meta descriptions, H1 headings, canonical URLs, HTTPS, image alt text.
Why it matters: These are the fundamentals. If a crawler cannot understand your page, an assistant has nothing to quote from it. Think of SEO as making sure your content has a clear label and description. Without these basics, everything else is harder.
Quick fix: Add a title tag (50-65 characters) and a meta description (120-155 characters) to every page. These are the first things a crawler reads.
2. AEO — Answer Engine Optimization
What it checks: FAQPage schema, HowTo schema, Article structure, BreadcrumbList, paragraph breakup.
Why it matters: Answer engines (Google's featured snippets, voice search, Siri, Alexa) need content structured as clear questions and answers. FAQ or HowTo markup gives an answer engine a clean question-and-answer pair to lift. Google states that structured data is not required for its generative AI features, so treat it as a strong helper, not the price of entry.
Quick fix: Add FAQPage structured data to any page with Q&A content. This is the change we would make first for Google's "People also ask" and AI Overviews.
3. GEO — Generative Engine Optimization
What it checks: Open Graph tags, JSON-LD structured data, Organization schema, word count, freshness signals.
Why it matters: ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude read your page differently than Google. What gets read: structured data (JSON-LD), named authorship, and content that actually answers the question. Pages that answer a question, and say plainly who published them, are the ones a chatbot can lift from. Google states that structured data is not required for its generative AI features — it is a helper, not the door.
Quick fix: Add Open Graph tags and JSON-LD Organization schema. These tell a crawler who you are and what the page is about - the equivalent of introducing yourself at a networking event.
4. Entity — Brand Identity Signals
What it checks: sameAs links (social profiles, Wikipedia), Organization schema with entity declarations, location/address signals.
Why it matters: AI models build a "knowledge graph" of who you are. If your site has sameAs links connecting it to your LinkedIn, Wikipedia, or Crunchbase profile, the AI treats you as a verified, trustworthy entity. sameAs links give a model a way to check that you are who you say you are, which is the clearest trust signal a small site controls.
Quick fix: Add sameAs links in your Organization schema pointing to your LinkedIn company page, Twitter, and any Wikipedia or Crunchbase entry. This is the first entity signal we check.
5. Structure — Content Organization
What it checks: H2 subheadings, bulleted/numbered lists, mobile viewport, language declaration.
Why it matters: AI models extract content by reading your heading hierarchy and pulling from structured elements like lists. Walls of unbroken paragraphs are hard for AI to excerpt cleanly. Well-structured content with H2s and bullets is easier to lift cleanly, and in the citations we check it is cited more often.
Quick fix: Add an H2 subheading before each new question and use bulleted lists for key points. Think of it as making your content "scoopable" for AI.
6. Citation — Trustworthiness Signals
What it checks: Author metadata, external links to authoritative sources, blockquotes, title descriptiveness.
Why it matters: AI models prefer to cite content with clear authorship and good citation hygiene. If you link to authoritative sources (government sites, research, industry bodies), the AI sees you as part of a credible information ecosystem. Anonymous content with no external links has the shape of spam, and reads that way.
Quick fix: Add author bylines and link to 3+ authoritative external sources per page. Show the AI you're part of a credible conversation, not shouting into the void.
7. Crawler — Accessibility to AI
What it checks: Robots meta tag, noindex status, sitemap references, text-to-code ratio.
Why it matters: If your page has a noindex tag or a very low text-to-code ratio (too much JavaScript, not enough readable text), AI crawlers can't access or understand your content. This is the plumbing — boring but essential.
Quick fix: Check for noindex tags (remove them if unintentional), add a sitemap.xml, and reduce inline CSS/JS by moving to external files.
How the Industry Survey Works
When you run a survey, every website you entered is fetched and scored across all seven dimensions, then shown as a league table from highest to lowest overall score. Sites are labeled A, B, C and so on, in random order.
Important: The published league table names no site — including us. The survey is anonymised by design - the league table shows site names to you and to nobody else, which is what lets the industry benchmarks be published without exposing anyone's data.
If you upgrade to a paid plan, you receive a named report that identifies your specific site's scores and gives you a personalized fix roadmap.
One Free Keyword Audit
After your industry survey, you get one additional free audit — this time for a specific keyword. For example, if you're a Singapore bakery, you could audit how the top-ranking sites for "best sourdough Singapore" score on AI visibility. This shows what came back when we put that question to the model - the closest thing we can show you to what a buyer sees.
To claim the free keyword audit, email support@proofposts.com with the keyword you want checked. No further free audits are available after that.