08Signal Strength
AI & Search Accessibility
AI & Search Accessibility evaluates visibility against the queries that represent real demand in the category — coverage, position, intent match and the share of that demand actually captured.
Why it matters
- Search remains the largest single channel of high-intent discovery in most categories.
- Coverage gaps are structural: absent pages cannot rank at any level of optimisation.
- Search presence is also an input to AI systems, which draw heavily on ranked and cited sources.
What strong looks like
- Visibility across the full intent spectrum, not only branded queries.
- A page that clearly matches each significant intent, with no cannibalisation.
- Coverage of the questions asked at decision stage, not only at awareness.
- Stable or improving position against named competitors over time.
Common failures
- Visibility that is almost entirely branded, mistaken for search performance.
- Multiple pages competing for the same intent.
- Content mapped to volume rather than to demand that converts.
- No coverage of comparison, pricing or alternative queries.
What we evaluate
- Visibility and position across a category query set.
- Coverage of intent categories and decision-stage queries.
- Competitive share of visible demand.
- Page-to-intent mapping and cannibalisation.
How to improve
- Build the query set from demand, then map one page to each significant intent.
- Consolidate competing pages rather than optimising both.
- Fill decision-stage gaps first — they convert at the highest rate.
- Track competitive share, not just position.
Standards it inherits from
Owned by Technical SEO and AI search. This dimension is not invented here — it states an existing discipline standard as something observable and scorable.
- Google Search Essentials
- Crawl, render and index practice
- robots.txt and canonical standards
Who owns it
Scoring anchors
- 3
- Key content is uncrawlable or blocked; indexation is partial and unmanaged.
- 5
- The site is indexed, but rendering, canonicals or robots rules leak value.
- 7
- Clean crawl and index coverage across primary templates, including AI crawlers.
- 9
- Every substantive page is crawlable, renderable, indexed and retrievable by name.
Illustrative median across published studies: 6.7
How to test it yourself
- Fetch a key page as a crawler and confirm the content is in the raw HTML.
- Read your robots.txt and check which AI crawlers are blocked, deliberately or not.
- Search for a distinctive sentence from a key page in quotes.
- Check canonical tags on paginated and parameterised URLs.
Questions
- Should AI crawlers be allowed?
- That is a business decision. What is scored is whether the decision was made deliberately and applied consistently — not which way it went.
Evidence
This dimension is scored from the following publicly observable sources. Where a source is unavailable for an organization, the limitation is recorded with the result rather than inferred around.
- Category query set visibility measurement
- SERP feature and competitor comparison
- Page-to-intent mapping analysis