Technical Score
Technical checks whether AI crawlers and search engines can actually fetch and read your page at all - before anything else about your content matters.
Why it exists
- An AI assistant can’t cite what it can’t reach - this is the most basic layer, checked before anything else.
- No amount of great writing helps if the page returns an error, loads too slowly, is missing from your sitemap, or is mostly markup instead of real text.
- Fix this layer first - it’s the foundation everything else sits on.
What’s checked
10 checks feed this score:
| Check | Severity | What it verifies |
|---|---|---|
| Status code | Critical | The page returns 200-299 (not broken, not erroring). |
| Indexability | Critical | The page isn’t tagged noindex. |
| Canonical URL | Warning | Engines know which version of a page to trust when duplicates exist. |
| Server response time | Warning, graded | Full credit under 800ms, half credit up to 1,500ms, zero beyond that. |
| Content-to-code ratio | Warning | Real text makes up at least 0.5% of the page’s bytes - pages that are mostly markup are hard to cite. |
| In sitemap | Notice | The page is listed where crawlers expect to discover it. |
| Mobile viewport | Notice | The page declares a mobile viewport tag. |
| Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) | Warning, graded | Full credit at ≤2.5s, half credit at ≤4s, zero beyond that. |
| Interaction to Next Paint (INP) | Notice, graded | Full credit at ≤200ms, half credit at ≤500ms, zero beyond that. |
| Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) | Notice, graded | Full credit at ≤0.1, half credit at ≤0.25, zero beyond that. |
Graded checks (response time and the three Core Web Vitals) don’t just pass or fail - a page that’s a little slow earns partial credit, not a zero.
What moves the needle most
Weighted the same way every score is:
- Critical issues (a broken status code or a noindex tag) count for 5 points.
- Warning-level issues (a slow server, a missing canonical) count for 2.
- Notice-level polish (a missing sitemap entry, a slow INP) counts for 1.
Fixing a critical issue is always the highest-leverage move.
How to raise it
- Make sure the page returns a normal 200 status and isn’t tagged noindex.
- Set a canonical URL if the same content exists at more than one address.
- Get server response time under 800ms for full credit (under 1.5s for partial) - enable caching/CDN for HTML.
- Trim script/markup bloat if real text is under 0.5% of the page’s bytes.
- Add the page to your XML sitemap.
- Confirm the page renders correctly on mobile with a proper viewport tag.
- Get LCP under 2.5s, INP under 200ms, and CLS under 0.1 for full Core Web Vitals credit.
A separate, site-wide layer
- Whether your robots.txt allows AI crawlers, whether your server/CDN lets AI bots through, and whether you have an
llms.txtfile are scored once for your whole site, not per page - see “Site setup” on the AEO Audit overview. - These two crawler-access checks are critical severity, but they don’t count toward this page’s numeric Technical score - instead they gate the page’s status: fail either one and the page is marked Blocked outright, since nothing else about the page matters if AI can’t reach it.
- If AI crawlers are blocked site-wide, your overall Site Health is also capped at 40 until that’s fixed.
