What the LLM Friendly Score measures
An LLM Friendly Score is a 0–100 measure of how easily AI crawlers — like OpenAI's GPTBot, Anthropic's ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot — can fetch, parse, and understand your website. A high score means the site is well-structured, openly accessible, and rich in semantic signals. A low score means the crawlers are getting blocked at the door or, worse, getting in but seeing nothing useful.
The 9 checks across 3 weighted categories
Our free LLM Friendly Score Calculator runs the same set of audits a technical SEO would perform manually, but tuned specifically for the way large language models consume the web.
- Crawler access (40 points) — robots.txt LLM bot policy, presence of an
/llms.txtfile, and sitemap discoverability via robots.txt. - Content accessibility (35 points) — no-JS content availability (server-rendered HTML), semantic HTML landmarks like
<main>and<article>, and a healthy text-to-markup ratio. - Content hygiene (25 points) — clean heading hierarchy with exactly one
<h1>, image alt-text coverage, and populated<title>plus meta description.
Scores map to letter grades: A (80+) is excellent and fully optimized, B (60–79) is good with minor gaps, C (40–59) needs work, and D (under 40) is critical — your site is essentially invisible to AI search.
Why this matters for AI search visibility
ChatGPT Search, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews are quickly becoming the layer between users and the open web. Every one of these surfaces is governed by the same fundamentals: can the crawler get in, and can it parse what it finds? Brands winning AI visibility today are the ones that — often unintentionally — kept their sites simple, server-rendered, and semantic. JavaScript-heavy SPAs with Disallow: / for AI bots and no llms.txt are losing without realizing why.
LLM-friendly is the new mobile-friendly. The free LLM Friendly Score Calculator above tells you exactly where you stand, what to fix, and how much each fix is worth.
Frequently asked questions
What is an LLM Friendly Score?
It's a 0–100 score of how easily LLM crawlers like GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot can fetch, parse, and understand your website — across nine technical checks in three categories.
Is the LLM Friendly Score the same as SEO?
There's overlap but they're not the same. SEO optimizes for Google rankings. LLM-friendliness optimizes for whether AI models can ingest your content at all and cite it confidently. A site can rank well on Google and still score poorly with LLMs.
Should I block GPTBot to protect my content?
Blocking AI crawlers prevents your content from being used in training data but also prevents you from being cited in AI answers. Most content businesses gain more from being discoverable than they lose to training-data inclusion.
What is llms.txt and do I need one?
llms.txt is an emerging standard — a markdown index at the root of your site that gives LLM crawlers a curated map of your most important pages. Sites with an llms.txtfile tend to get cited more often because the model doesn't have to guess what's worth reading.
How often should I re-run the audit?
Once after every major site change (template overhaul, framework migration, new robots.txt). Otherwise, quarterly is enough. The signals are structural, not volatile.
What's the difference between LLM Friendly Score and AEO Score?
LLM Friendly Score is about access — can the crawler reach and parse your content? AEO Score is about citability — once it parses you, are you structured well enough to be quoted in an AI answer? You want both.