What is AI readiness and why does it matter?
AI agents evaluate businesses differently to humans. This explains what AI readiness is and why it's becoming as important as SEO.
AI readiness is the degree to which your business is discoverable, understandable, and actionable by AI agents, systems like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and autonomous purchasing agents that evaluate products and services on behalf of users.
Why AI readiness matters
Search engines brought a generation of optimisation work focused on ranking in Google. AI agents are creating a new category of optimisation, one that requires different signals. When a user asks ChatGPT to recommend a project management tool, ChatGPT doesn't rank pages by keyword density. It looks for:
- Whether it can access your site at all (robots.txt permissions)
- Whether it can understand what your business does (structured data, llms.txt)
- Whether it can find your pricing (server-rendered pricing pages)
- Whether there's an API for action-taking agents to use
A business with excellent SEO but poor AI readiness will be visible in Google and invisible to AI agents. As AI-assisted search grows, BrightEdge data suggests 58% of consumers now use AI instead of Google for product recommendations, that gap becomes a revenue problem.
How Faro measures AI readiness
Faro scans any URL and scores it 0–100 across six categories, each mapped to signals that AI agents actually use when evaluating a business. The categories are: Structured Data, Content Discoverability, Trust & Identity, Agent Permissions, Agent Infrastructure, and Pricing Transparency.
Each category contains specific checks. A failed check means an AI agent evaluating your site is missing a signal it would use to confidently recommend you. The score reflects how many of those signals are present and correct.
What a good score looks like
Grade A (90+) means your site is well-configured for AI agent evaluation. Grade B (80–89) means minor gaps. Grade C (70–79) means moderate gaps that are likely affecting recommendations. Grade D (55–69) and Grade F (below 55) mean significant gaps that AI agents will encounter when trying to evaluate your business.
The average score across sites Faro has scanned is 41/100, most businesses have significant room to improve.