What the number means, and what it deliberately does not mean.
5 min read
The score is a single number from 0 to 100 with a letter grade. It exists to tell you whether something needs attention, and it is deliberately not the most important thing on the page. A score can be high while a specific crawler you care about is still blocked.
Read the tiers, not just the total
A total can hide the thing that matters. Blocking a handful of low-tier scrapers barely moves the number and barely matters. Blocking one Tier 1 retrieval crawler can remove you from an AI answer entirely. Always look at Tier 1 before you celebrate a grade.
Why bots are tiered
Not every crawler carries the same consequence, so the database sorts all 196 of them into 6 tiers. Tier 1 is the set whose absence you would actually notice: the crawlers that fetch a page so an assistant can cite it, and the major search engines. The lowest tiers are scrapers with no upside for you at all.
This is also why two sites with the same score can be in very different situations. The tier weighting means the score reflects consequence, not a raw count of how many bots you happen to allow.
Training crawlers versus retrieval crawlers
This is the distinction that matters most, and it is the one most often missed.
Training
Collects text to train a future model. Blocking it is a reasonable editorial or licensing decision. It does not remove you from search results and it does not stop you being cited today.
Retrieval
Fetches your page at the moment someone asks a question, so the assistant can quote and link you. Block this and you become invisible in AI answers even though your SEO is untouched.
The common mistake
Copying a "block all AI bots" snippet from a forum. Those lists usually mix both kinds together, so people who only meant to opt out of model training also silently remove themselves from being cited. The report separates them so you can make the choice on purpose.
The GEO side of the report
Access is necessary but not sufficient. A crawler can reach a page and still fail to understand it well enough to quote. The 58 GEO checks cover that second half, grouped into these areas:
Technical SEO
Content Quality
AI Readiness
Security & Trust
UX
A WAF can make results look worse than reality
If a firewall blocks our request for your robots.txt, that is a fact about your firewall, not proof that crawlers are blocked. The report says so explicitly instead of reporting a confident wrong answer. If you see a WAF notice, verify by opening your robots.txt in a normal browser.
Common questions
What is a good AI visibility score?
Anything in the 80s or above usually means nothing is structurally wrong. But a score is a summary: check the Tier 1 row directly, because a high score can still coexist with one important retrieval crawler being blocked.
Why is my score low when my SEO is fine?
Traditional SEO and AI visibility are different problems. A site can rank well in Google and still be unreadable to assistants, most often because a broad robots.txt rule blocks retrieval crawlers, or because the page carries no structured data and no clear answer-shaped content.
Will blocking AI training bots hurt my Google rankings?
No. Training crawlers such as GPTBot and Google-Extended are separate from Googlebot. Blocking them has no effect on search rankings. Blocking Googlebot or Bingbot is what removes you from search results.
Does the score change if I block scrapers?
Only slightly, by design. Low-tier scrapers offer you little benefit, so allowing or blocking them barely moves the number. The weighting deliberately concentrates on crawlers whose absence has real consequences.
My report shows a firewall block. Is my site misconfigured?
Not necessarily. It means a WAF such as Cloudflare answered our request with a challenge instead of your file. Crawlers with more established reputations may not be treated the same way. Open your robots.txt in a browser to see the real file, and if you want crawlers treated predictably, allowlist the ones you care about at the firewall.
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