The GEO Score is made up of eight categories. The first six form the core 100-point scoring foundation. The final two — Google AI Mode Readiness and Agent Readiness — are bonus categories worth up to 10 points each, with the overall score always capped at 100. This means strong performance in the new categories can compensate for gaps elsewhere.
1. AI Bot Access — up to 20 points
Checks whether major AI crawlers are explicitly permitted in your robots.txt. Blocked bots cannot index your content regardless of how well structured the rest of your site is.
What is checked:
- GPTBot (OpenAI) — 4 points
- ClaudeBot (Anthropic) — 4 points
- Google-Extended (Gemini) — 4 points
- PerplexityBot — 4 points
- Bingbot (Copilot) — 4 points
How to fix: Add Allow: / for each bot under its User-agent directive in robots.txt. The AI Visibility Kit generates a correctly formatted file automatically.
2. Sitemap Quality — up to 10 points
A valid, accessible sitemap is one of the most reliable signals AI systems use to understand site structure. A missing or broken sitemap means crawlers may miss significant portions of your content.
What is checked:
- Sitemap is present at
/sitemap.xmlor declared inrobots.txt— 3 points - Sitemap returns HTTP 200 — 3 points
- Sitemap is valid XML — 2 points
- Sitemap contains at least one URL — 2 points
How to fix: Generate a sitemap via Indexora or your CMS, ensure it returns 200, and declare it in robots.txt with Sitemap: https://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml.
3. Structured Data — up to 20 points
JSON-LD schema tells AI systems what type of entity your site represents, what your business does, and how to describe it accurately. It is the most direct way to control how AI models understand you.
What is checked:
- JSON-LD present in page
<head>— 8 points - Schema type identified (Organization, LocalBusiness, etc.) — 4 points
- Schema is complete (name, URL, description present) — 4 points
- No schema parsing errors — 4 points
How to fix: Add the website-schema.json contents from your AI Visibility Kit to your site's <head> inside a <script type="application/ld+json"> tag.
4. Meta Tags — up to 15 points
Meta tags are used by AI systems during initial page evaluation. Open Graph tags in particular are parsed by many LLM retrieval pipelines as a fast way to understand page context.
What is checked:
- Title tag present and non-empty — 3 points
- Meta description present — 3 points
- Open Graph title and description — 4 points
- Twitter Card tags — 3 points
- Canonical URL declared — 2 points
How to fix: Use the meta-tags.html file from your kit and paste it into your site's <head>.
5. Core Web Vitals — up to 25 points
Page performance affects whether AI systems consider your site reliable enough to cite. Slow or unstable pages score lower, even if all other signals are correct.
What is checked (via Google PageSpeed Insights API, mobile scores):
- LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) — up to 7 points
- CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) — up to 6 points
- FCP (First Contentful Paint) — up to 6 points
- TTFB (Time to First Byte) — up to 6 points
Scoring thresholds follow Google's Good / Needs Improvement / Poor scale. A "Good" rating on each metric earns full points for that metric.
How to fix: Optimise images, reduce server response time, eliminate render-blocking scripts, and use a CDN. These are server and frontend optimisations outside Indexora's direct scope.
6. HTTPS & Security — up to 10 points
AI systems treat HTTP-only sites as low-trust. Security headers signal that a site is actively maintained and following modern web standards.
What is checked:
- HTTPS active (valid certificate, no mixed content) — 4 points
- HSTS header present — 3 points
- Basic security headers (X-Frame-Options, X-Content-Type-Options) — 3 points
How to fix: Enable HTTPS via your hosting provider or Cloudflare. Add security headers via Cloudflare Transform Rules, Nginx config, or .htaccess.
7. Google AI Mode Readiness — up to 10 points (bonus)
Google AI Mode surfaces answers from sites it deems well-structured for AI comprehension. This category checks the specific signals Google uses when composing AI Mode responses.
What is checked:
- AI-relevant Schema.org types present (Organization, LocalBusiness, Article, FAQPage, or Product) — 3 points
- FAQPage schema — improves conversational query coverage — 2 points
- Google AI crawlers not blocked (Google-Extended, GoogleOther) — 2 points
- llms.txt present — structured content summary for AI engines — 2 points
- LCP ≤ 2,500ms — meets Google AI Mode page experience threshold — 1 point
How to fix: Add the faq-schema.json and website-schema.json files from your AI Visibility Kit. Ensure Google-Extended and GoogleOther are permitted in robots.txt. Deploy llms.txt via Hosted Files.
8. AI Agent Readiness — up to 10 points (bonus)
As AI agents (not just search) begin autonomously browsing and transacting on the web, sites need to explicitly declare their identity and permissions for agents. This category follows the Cloudflare Agent Readiness spec.
What is checked:
- agents.md present — agent identity and interaction permissions defined — 3 points
- llms.txt present and accessible — 2 points
- Explicit AI crawler directives in robots.txt (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Anthropic-AI) — 2 points
- JSON-LD structured data present — agents can parse business entity data — 2 points
- llms-full.txt present — extended content available for agents — 1 point
How to fix: Deploy agents.md and llms.txt from your AI Visibility Kit. Ensure AI crawler directives are explicitly listed in robots.txt. Add JSON-LD schema to your site's <head>.