What the Citation Readiness Score actually measures.

Overview of the five dimensions

The Citation Readiness Score is a 0–100 composite of five dimensions. Each dimension is scored 0.0 – 1.0; the overall score is the geometric mean × 100. We chose geometric mean specifically because it makes a single zero collapse the total — you can't paper over a structural failure in Dual Fit or Bot-Crawl Health by stacking points elsewhere.

Two of the five dimensions act as hard-blocks: if either Dual Fit or Bot-Crawl Health scores 0.0, we report the structural failure instead of the aggregate. The other three dimensions (SEO Foundation, GEO Readiness, Entity Coherence) can score zero without hard-blocking — they reduce the overall score but don't flip the verdict to STRUCTURAL FAIL.

SEO Foundation — 13 signals

SEO and GEO/AEO are the same discipline at different latency layers. SEO Foundation captures the conventional ranking signals that determine whether your page shows up in Google search results (and via the same backbone, in AI Overviews and Perplexity / Bing citations).

• Stable URL slug — no /p/12345 numeric-only paths
• Unique <title> in 50–60 characters with primary keyword early
• Unique <meta description> ~155 characters
• Single <h1> matching the title intent
• H2 structure reflecting sub-topics
• ≥3 in-context internal links to related pages
• Schema.org (WebPage or Article minimum)
• OpenGraph + Twitter Card complete
• Canonical URL declared
• hreflang if multi-lingual, or single-locale signal otherwise
• Mobile-perfect render at 375px viewport (mobile-first)
• Core Web Vitals targets (LCP <1.5s · INP <200ms · CLS <0.05 · TTFB <400ms)
• IndexNow ping on deploy

The score is (items passing) / 13 rounded to 0.1.

GEO Readiness — 10 signals (Aleyda checklist)

See our dedicated guide on the 10-characteristic checklist. The score is (items passing) / 10 rounded to 0.1.

Dual Fit — 4 signals (HARD-BLOCK at 0)

Dual Fit is the hardest dimension because most pages target ONE of {keyword ranking, AI citation} — not both. A Dual-Fit page does both. We check four heuristics:

• Title targets a real query intent (not "Home", "Index", blank)
• First paragraph contains a fact-shaped phrase (number, year, "is a", "means", "according to")
• First paragraph ≤600 chars (LLMs extract short answers, not essays)
• At least one H2 phrased as a question users actually ask

If ALL four fail, Dual Fit = 0.0 and we hard-block the audit verdict. The page is structurally an orphan — neither search nor LLM citation will surface it. The fix is structural rewrite, not optimization.

Entity Coherence — 5 signals

LLMs build entity graphs from coherent signals across the site. Five things we check:

• Organization JSON-LD schema with name, url, logo, sameAs
• Person JSON-LD schema for the operator/author
• sameAs count ≥2 (at least 2 public profiles linked from JSON-LD)
• Link to /about in the visible navigation or footer
• Consistent brand name across <title>, og:site_name, and Organization schema

Bot-Crawl Health — 5 signals (HARD-BLOCK at 0)

Citation is impossible if AI bots can't crawl your site. This is the upstream gate. We check:

• robots.txt does not Disallow any of the 9 major AI crawlers
• /llms.txt present at site root
• Body content ≥200 words in first-paint HTML (GPTBot + PerplexityBot don't execute JS)
• Server returns the same HTML to GPTBot UA as to a browser (no cloaking)
• Cloudflare AI Crawl Control set to "Do not block" (where Cloudflare-proxied)

Hard-block conditions: robots.txt blocks AI bots OR first-paint body is <50 words (suggesting JS-gated content). In both cases the audit verdict reports the structural failure instead of an aggregate.

How we aggregate to 0–100

Per dimension we get a score 0.0 – 1.0. The overall is:

overall = geometric_mean(seoFoundation, geoReadiness, dualFit, entityCoherence, botCrawlHealth) × 100

Geometric mean is multiplicative — a single zero collapses the total. That's by design: if any one dimension is zero, the page is broken in a structural way that no amount of optimization on the others can fix. We'd rather report a low overall score than mask a structural failure.

Try it on your own URL: Free Citation Readiness Score.