AI Readiness

AI readiness measures how well your site is positioned for AI-powered engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini. These platforms crawl, index, and cite web content differently from traditional search engines, so optimizing for them requires attention to signals that go beyond conventional SEO.

The AI Readiness tab in Align gives you a clear picture of what AI engines can see when they visit your site, what they cannot access, and what you can improve.

Align checks whether your site has an llms.txt file at the root of your domain. This file tells AI crawlers what content is available, how your site is structured, and which pages are most relevant.

Think of llms.txt as a robots.txt specifically designed for large language models. It provides a human-readable and machine-parsable summary of your site's content so AI systems can understand and reference it more accurately.

Align analyzes the content on your pages to detect AI-generated text. While AI-generated content is not inherently penalized by search engines, understanding the balance between human-written and AI-generated content helps you maintain quality and authenticity signals.

The analysis provides a detection indicator so you can review which pages may benefit from additional human editing or original research.

Your robots.txt file controls which bots can crawl your site. Align specifically checks whether the following AI crawlers are allowed or blocked:

• GPTBot — OpenAI's crawler used by ChatGPT.
• ClaudeBot — Anthropic's crawler used by Claude.
• PerplexityBot — Perplexity AI's web crawler.

For each bot, Align reports whether it is explicitly allowed, explicitly blocked, or not mentioned (which typically means allowed by default). Blocking these bots prevents your content from appearing in AI-generated answers.

AI engines rely heavily on metadata to understand and cite your content. Align evaluates how well your metadata serves this purpose by checking:

• Whether your title tag clearly describes the page topic.
• Whether your meta description provides a useful summary that AI can quote.
• Whether Open Graph tags give AI platforms structured context for previews and citations.
• Whether JSON-LD schemas provide machine-readable data about your content type.

High-quality metadata increases the likelihood that AI engines accurately summarize and attribute your content when answering user queries.

To improve your AI readiness score, focus on these actions:

• Add an llms.txt file — create an llms.txt file at your domain root that describes your site, its key pages, and their topics.
• Allow AI bots in robots.txt — make sure GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot are not blocked in your robots.txt.
• Improve metadata — ensure every page has a clear title, descriptive meta description, complete Open Graph tags, and relevant JSON-LD schemas. See the SEO X-Ray and Schema & JSON-LD guides for details.