RankOps AI Visibility Rubric · Category 4 of 8
Node Breadth and Coverage: Up to 15 of 100 Points
Node breadth and coverage measures how well your website connects your business to its other official places online, such as your Google Business Profile, Facebook and Yelp pages, and how much of your site you publish for crawlers to find. Those connections help AI confirm that the profiles it reads all describe the same business, and give it more trustworthy material to describe you with.
Why it matters to AI
Search engines and AI assistants do not learn about a business from one page. They gather facts from many places: your website, your Google Business Profile, social pages and review sites. Then they work out which of those facts belong to the same business. Each place is a node, and the more clearly official nodes point to each other, the easier they are to tie together.
A link from your website to your Facebook page is a claim only you can make: this profile is ours. Without it, a system has to guess from the name, phone and address whether the page belongs to you or to a business with a similar name. That is why this category pairs with entity identity consistency: the links say the profiles are yours, and matching details confirm it. Your own social profiles, such as Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn, and your Google Business Profile are not counted as independent authority, because you control them. A listing on a review site such as Yelp or BBB can count there.
Structured data makes the same claim in a form machines read directly. Google's introduction to structured data explains how it describes a page and its subject, and the schema.org LocalBusiness type includes a sameAs property for listing the official pages that identify the business. A sitemap does the coverage half of the job: it lists the pages you want crawlers to find, so more of what you publish can be read.
How the AI Visibility Map scores it
| Signal | What earns points | Points |
|---|---|---|
| Profiles linked from your homepage | 1.5 points for each platform linked, up to five | Up to 7.5 |
| Profile links in your schema (sameAs) | 3 or more profile links: 4.5. 1 or 2: 2 | Up to 4.5 |
| Sitemap | 20 or more pages: 3. 5 to 19: 2. 1 to 4, or a sitemap it could not count: 1 | Up to 3 |
The three signals are added, the total is rounded to a whole number and capped at 15.
Profiles linked from your homepage (up to 7.5 points)
The map reads the links in your homepage HTML and looks for full web addresses that point to known profile platforms: Google Business Profile or Maps, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Yelp, BBB, Nextdoor, YouTube, TikTok, X, Angi and similar services. Each platform earns 1.5 points once, so five platforms reach the 7.5 maximum. Two links to the same Facebook page still count as one. Profile links added by JavaScript after the page loads are not seen, and neither are links that only appear on inner pages, with one exception: a LinkedIn link on an inner page the map reads, such as your About or Contact page, also counts.
Profile links in your schema (up to 4.5 points)
This checks the sameAs list inside your homepage structured data. Three or more profile links earn 4.5 points, and one or two earn 2. Only profiles count. A link to the homepage of a whole website, or to a page on your own site, is listed in your map as not counted, because it does not identify a profile that belongs to you. No structured data, or no sameAs on your business or organization entry, earns nothing here. A sameAs list on a WebSite or Person entry is not read.
Sitemap (up to 3 points)
The map looks for the sitemap named in your robots.txt, then at /sitemap.xml and /sitemap_index.xml, and counts the pages listed. Twenty or more pages earn 3 points, 5 to 19 earn 2, and 1 to 4 earn 1. A sitemap that was found but could not be counted still earns 1. A sitemap whose pages the map can count also earns a point in first-party machine clarity.
How to improve it
- List the profiles that matter for your kind of business. For a local service business that usually means Google, Facebook and Yelp. Claim any you have not claimed, and make the name, phone and address on each match your website.
- Link each one from your homepage, usually in the footer, using its full address. Use your Google Business Profile share link rather than a search results link.
- Add the same profile addresses to the sameAs list in your homepage structured data. Many site builders and SEO plugins have a social profiles field that does this. Google's local business structured data guide shows where business details go.
- Remove your own website and other plain homepages from sameAs. They do not count and can blur which profiles are yours.
- Make sure you have a sitemap, that it lists your real pages, and that robots.txt points to it. Google's robots.txt introduction covers the file.
- Grow the sitemap with useful pages, one per service or common question, not thin pages made to raise a count.
The link and schema steps take an afternoon for most owners. Claiming and verifying a profile can take days, and good new pages take longer. The AI Entity Fix ($1,225) covers the agreed priority fixes across your website, structured data, Google Business Profile and selected directories. If the site itself is the problem, the AI HQ Build ($4,997) includes the website, structured data and entity signals, 20 FAQ answers with schema, 5 neighborhood pages and 5 to 10 citation pages. Neither guarantees what any AI engine will say.
On the example map
The example AI Visibility Map on the RankOps homepage is a real report emailed on Oct 10, 2026 for buy-sell.land, a business owned by RankOps founder Tyler Moncrieff. Its Facebook and LinkedIn rectangles are green because buy-sell.land links those profiles from the homepage (Yelp is linked too, but the picture shows only 10 of the map's 12 items). The red dashed "Google not linked" rectangle is a gap: no Google profile was linked from the homepage, so it missed the 1.5 points a linked profile earns. This category earned 12 of 15.
Common questions
Do I need a profile on every platform to score well?
No. Five linked profiles earn the full 7.5 points for that signal, and the map counts each platform once. A few complete, accurate profiles that match your website do more for how AI identifies you than many empty ones. Pick the platforms your customers actually use, such as Google, Facebook and Yelp for a local service business.
What is sameAs, and do I need a developer to add it?
sameAs is a property in your structured data that lists the official profiles that belong to your business. It is a few lines in your site's JSON-LD. Many website builders and SEO plugins have a field for social profiles that adds it for you. If yours does not, it is usually a small job for a developer.
Why does my sitemap affect this score?
A sitemap lists the pages you want crawlers to find. The map counts the pages in it as a rough measure of how much of your business is published for machines to read. A bigger sitemap only helps when each page is real and useful. Padding it with thin pages does not make your business any clearer to AI.
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