How we actually score your site
You just saw a number. Here's exactly where it came from — the checks we run, how much each one counts, and what we don't claim.
Three stages. No guesswork in between.
Diagnose
A technical crawl of your site — every page checked against 14 SEO and GEO-readiness dimensions, plus a direct test of whether AI crawlers (GPTBot, Google-Extended, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, CCBot) can actually read your content.
Takes about two minutes. No account required to see your score.
Produce
Content generation grounded in your Business DNA — the profile we extract from your actual site and offerings — written in your target market's language, not generic filler.
Every draft is meant to be reviewed before it goes live.
Measure
Once you connect Google Search Console, you see real clicks, impressions, and rankings per article — not projections.
If a page isn't performing, you'll see that too.
How the Health Score is built
Every issue we find falls into one of three tiers. We don't invent a single blended number from vibes — each tier maps to a real, checkable condition on your site.
Breaks a page outright, or blocks visibility entirely.
- A broken link returning a 4xx or 5xx error
- A page missing its H1 heading entirely
On-page problems that cost you clicks or rankings.
- A title over 60 characters, which search engines truncate
- A missing meta description
- A meta description over 160 characters
Softer signals search and AI engines use to judge freshness and depth.
- Content under 300 words on a page
- A page that takes over 3 seconds to load
- A page over 5 seconds — a much larger penalty
- No datePublished or dateModified markup
- No visible author byline
Your Health Score starts at 100 and loses points per issue found, weighted by how much it actually affects visibility — a missing meta description costs more than a missing OG image.
Can AI engines actually read your site?
Search is no longer the only place people look for answers — they ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews too. GEO readiness measures whether your site is structured so those engines can cite it. The score is weighted by what actually blocks visibility:
If GPTBot, Google-Extended, or another major AI crawler is blocked in your robots.txt, that's the single heaviest penalty. No access, no citation, regardless of content quality.
Machine-readable markup that helps AI engines parse what your page is about.
Lists, tables, and question-style headings — the formats AI engines extract most easily.
FAQPage schema, one of the most directly quotable content formats.
datePublished/dateModified and visible author attribution, which affect how much an AI engine trusts your content.
What GEO readiness is not
We do not track whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, or any AI engine has actually cited your content — no one can reliably monitor that today, and we won't pretend otherwise. What we measure is readiness: whether your site is structured the way engines are known to prefer.
AI-generated content is a draft, not a finished asset — every article ScaletoTop produces is meant to be reviewed before you publish it. A high GEO score improves your odds of being cited. It is not a guarantee, and anyone who tells you they can guarantee AI citations is selling something we can't.
Common questions
Is my content used to train AI models?+
No. When we use AI providers to help generate or analyze content, your data is used only to complete that task — never to train general-purpose models.
How often does my score update?+
Sites you add are automatically re-checked with a lightweight scan every day, at no cost to you. Need the full deep scan again right now? You can re-run it anytime from your dashboard for one credit.
Does a low score mean my site is failing?+
Not necessarily. A lower score usually means there's low-effort, high-impact work available — most issues we flag, like a missing meta description, take minutes to fix and don't require a redesign.
How is this different from a generic SEO checker?+
Most SEO tools stop at classic search-engine signals. We check those, plus whether AI engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity can actually crawl and cite your content — a layer most tools don't test at all.
What happens after I see my score?+
Nothing, unless you want it to. The diagnosis is free and stays free. If you want help acting on it — fixing issues, generating grounded content, tracking real rankings — that's what a free account unlocks.