Everything that sits behind the number

The agents that search live and cite with a link. Blocking them costs you real visibility.

A noindex in the tag or in the HTTP header leaves the page out, even when the crawler gets in.

If the page does not answer with a 2xx, there is nothing to read.

A badly tuned WAF hands a challenge to legitimate agents. Your robots.txt says yes and your infrastructure says no.

A firewall can let an unknown crawler through and shut out exactly the AI ones. You only see it by requesting the page under their name.

Become eligible for AI Overviews and Copilot answers without touching robots.txt.

A robots.txt that returns a server error, or doesn't respond at all, is read as a blanket ban on crawling.

Basic requirement. Without it, several agents don't even try.

Every hop is a chance to lose the crawler along the way.

An agent resolving a live question is in a hurry: someone is waiting on the answer.

Blocking them is a legitimate editorial decision and does not affect whether you get cited. We tell you; it costs you no points.

A Markdown version saves the model from taking your HTML apart, and with it the risk of your text getting lost among menus and banners.

When an agent asks for an address that doesn't exist, a 404 in Markdown tells it where to go next without taking HTML apart.

A commerce manifest lets a shopping agent read your whole catalogue without depending on it reading each product page correctly.

Operators rename their bots. A rule written for the old name silently stops applying.

Some CDNs and plugins add noai by default. It is not a standard, but you should know it is there.

Agents rarely get past a CAPTCHA: a box in view on the entry page, not just inside a form, can stop one that needs to interact with the page. Informational: it does not affect the score.

No relevant AI crawler runs JavaScript. If the content is assembled in the browser, what they see is an empty page.

A patch, not a fix: it is there to warn, not to replace.

The most basic signal about what the page is about.

With no links in the HTML, the crawler never gets past the page it landed on.

With no declared language, the content can end up in the wrong group.

Marking up with <main> or <article> separates the content from the menu and the footer.

Past the size limit the crawler truncates the document, and the end of the page stops existing.

Whatever is in an image without alt text doesn't exist for a crawler. Informational: it does not affect the score.

Headings are the outline AI uses to split the page. Informational: it does not affect the score.

An agent filling in a form reads the name of each field; without a label, it guesses. Informational: it does not affect the score.

Hidden text that gives orders to an AI is a possible injection, for example from a compromised plugin. Informational: it does not affect the score.

Saying outright what otherwise has to be inferred from the prose.

One comma too many and the whole block is discarded. There is no graceful degradation.

If the same page is reachable through several URLs, the signal is split between them.

Declaring something is not the same as declaring who you are: that takes an entity type.

The first thing anyone reads of the page, on it and away from it.

The list of what you want found, without depending on links.

When the versions are wired up wrong, search engines serve the page in the wrong language.

The summary shown when somebody finds you.

Loose entities leave it to guesswork that they describe the same business; linked, it is stated.

Two records that contradict each other are worth less than one: in doubt, neither gets used.

A button that navigates only exists with JavaScript. Informational: it does not affect the score.

It's what shows when someone pastes your link into a chat or a social network. Informational: it does not affect the score.

Who wrote it and when: what gets checked before a text is trusted. Informational: it does not affect the score.

It is what an assistant uses to confirm the business is real and to answer «how do I contact them?». Informational: it does not affect the score.

A Markdown index of your key pages. No major assistant has confirmed it reads it, but it costs five minutes and does no harm.