How we score a domain
Every website you verify on iSuggest.ai gets a single GEO score out of 100 and a letter grade. This page is the whole method: the pillars, their weights, every individual check, and the cases where we refuse to give a grade at all. It is published because a score you cannot audit is not worth much, and because we would rather you argue with the method than guess at it.
The page and the calculation read the same definitions from the same file, so what is written here cannot drift away from what we actually compute. Current version: 1.0.
The four pillars
Each pillar is scored out of 100 and then weighted. The weights add up to 100.
| Pillar | What it measures | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| Page health | How the individual pages we have audited score, blended so that systemic problems cannot be hidden behind one good page. | 55% |
| Site technical | Whether the site as a whole is reachable, crawlable, and open to the AI crawlers that answer engines use. | 20% |
| Consistency and coverage | Whether pages describe themselves distinctly and point at themselves correctly, and whether we have seen enough of the site to judge it. | 15% |
| GEO and entity readiness | Whether machines can tell what this site is, who publishes it, and which parts are worth quoting. | 10% |
Page health
This pillar is a calculation rather than a checklist. Each page you audit already gets its own score from our page-level rules; the domain figure blends them:
- 70% the average of your page scores, and 30% the 10th percentile — your weakest pages. A site with one excellent page and nine broken ones should not be able to average its way to a good grade.
- The home page counts 2×, because it is the page an answer engine reaches first.
Site technical
Whether the site as a whole is reachable, crawlable, and open to the AI crawlers that answer engines use.
| Check | What passes | Points |
|---|---|---|
| AI crawlers are not blocked | robots.txt does not disallow the crawlers that answer engines use. Blocking them is the single most damaging thing a site can do to its AI visibility. | 30 |
| A valid XML sitemap exists | sitemap.xml is reachable, parses as XML, and lists at least one URL. | 20 |
| No audited page returns an error | Every page we have audited answered with a 2xx or 3xx status. | 15 |
| robots.txt is readable | robots.txt either serves cleanly or is absent. A server error here leaves crawlers guessing what they may fetch. | 15 |
| robots.txt points to the sitemap | A Sitemap: line in robots.txt is how most crawlers discover it. | 10 |
| The home page serves over HTTPS | https://your-domain/ answers successfully. | 10 |
Points within a pillar total 100. Some checks are scored proportionally rather than pass or fail — if eight of ten pages point at themselves correctly, that check earns eight tenths of its points.
Consistency and coverage
Whether pages describe themselves distinctly and point at themselves correctly, and whether we have seen enough of the site to judge it.
| Check | What passes | Points |
|---|---|---|
| Every page has its own title | No two audited pages share a title. Duplicates make pages look interchangeable. | 30 |
| Pages point at themselves | Each page has a canonical URL, and it is the page itself. | 25 |
| Every page has its own description | No two audited pages share a meta description. | 25 |
| Enough of the site has been audited | Measured against a target sample rather than the whole site, so a large site is never penalised for being large. | 20 |
Points within a pillar total 100. Some checks are scored proportionally rather than pass or fail — if eight of ten pages point at themselves correctly, that check earns eight tenths of its points.
GEO and entity readiness
Whether machines can tell what this site is, who publishes it, and which parts are worth quoting.
| Check | What passes | Points |
|---|---|---|
| The home page identifies the organisation | Organization or LocalBusiness structured data on the home page tells an answer engine who publishes the site. | 35 |
| Structured data is used across the site | Scored on the share of audited pages carrying any JSON-LD. | 25 |
| Quotable content is marked up | At least one page uses FAQPage, Article, HowTo, Product or BreadcrumbList — the types answer engines quote most readily. | 20 |
| The site name is consistent | Pages that declare og:site_name agree on it. | 10 |
| At least one page is published to an AI directory | A frozen snapshot at a stable URL that AI crawlers are explicitly allowed to read. | 10 |
Points within a pillar total 100. Some checks are scored proportionally rather than pass or fail — if eight of ten pages point at themselves correctly, that check earns eight tenths of its points.
Grades
When we will not give you a grade
A number we cannot stand behind is worse than no number, so there are three cases where we say so plainly instead of scoring you.
- Fewer than 3 audited pages. You still see each page's own score, but no domain grade. An average of one or two samples is noise.
- We cannot load your home page. You get a single clear message rather than a breakdown, because there is nothing behind it to break down.
- A pillar we cannot measure is dropped, not scored zero, and the remaining weights are rescaled. With one audited page, "no duplicate titles" is not a pass — it is not a question.
Two ceilings
Some problems are bad enough that a high score elsewhere should not paper over them.
-
If your home page cannot be indexed — it fails to return a success status, or it is
marked
noindex— the domain score is capped at 49. - If your robots.txt blocks every AI crawler we check for, the score is capped at 59. For a tool about generative engine optimisation this is the single most damaging thing a site can do, so we say so loudly.
The crawlers we check: GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, Claude-SearchBot, Google-Extended, PerplexityBot.
Fairness notes
- Large sites are not punished for being large. Coverage is measured against a target sample of 25 pages, not against your whole sitemap. A site with fifty thousand URLs and twenty-five audited pages scores full marks for coverage.
- We only score what we can observe from a page we audited or a file we fetched. Nothing on this page is scored on a signal we cannot actually read.
- Categories are averaged only over the pages that reported them. Commerce checks apply to pages where we detected commerce, and not to your about page.
- Your score is private by default. A domain scorecard is visible only to the verified owner unless that owner chooses to publish it.
What this score is not
It is a measure of how ready your site is to be read, understood and quoted by search engines and AI answer engines. It is not a prediction of traffic, and it is not a guarantee of ranking, indexing or citation — those depend on systems run by other companies, which change without notice. See our Terms of Service for the full position, and how it works for the audit itself.