Answer guide · how the score works
The AI Visibility Scorecard: 17 Signals, Explained
The RankOps AI visibility score reads your live website the way AI engines do and grades 17 on-page signals across three groups: found & readable (26 points), AI citation signals (44 points), and local & discoverable (30 points). Under 30 is Invisible; 85 and up is Dominant. We publish the whole scorecard because the method survives being seen.
Group 1 — Found & readable (26 points)
Can engines fetch and parse you at all? Site loads for AI readers (6), HTTPS (4), a clear title (5), a meta description (4), one main headline (4), mobile viewport (3). Boring, foundational, and still failed by a surprising share of local sites.
Group 2 — AI citation signals (44 points)
The quotable layer, weighted heaviest because it's what generated answers actually lift: structured data present (9), business schema identifying who/where you are (9), FAQ markup (10 — the single heaviest signal), Speakable markup (7), and Open Graph tags (9). If you fix only one group, fix this one — see which schema matters.
Group 3 — Local & discoverable (30 points)
Can engines place you? Mentions your city (6), visible phone number (6), llms.txt file (4), sitemap (4), a LinkedIn entity link (4), and neighborhood/location pages (6). This group is why a technically clean site can still lose "near me" questions.
The tiers
Under 30: Invisible. 30–49: Emerging. 50–69: Visible. 70–84: Established. 85+: Dominant. Triple B's Mechanics went 78 → 96 through a full rebuild — the tiers are the same scale on the free check, the client dashboard, and our own daily self-audit.
The one thing that overrides the score
If your site sends a noindex instruction, the score is reported as Invisible no matter how many points it earned. A page can do everything else right and still be telling search engines not to list it, and no amount of schema makes up for not being in the index at all.
This is a gate, not a deduction. The points are untouched, so a score stays comparable with every check run before it — what changes is the label and the top issue, which leads with the block. We check three places it hides: a robots or per-engine meta tag in the page, an X-Robots-Tag header set at the server which never appears in the markup at all, and a robots.txt that disallows every crawler.
Blocking one AI crawler is treated differently on purpose. If your robots.txt disallows GPTBot but lets everyone else through, that leads your issue list by name — but the tier is left alone, because the site is still perfectly findable everywhere else. Reporting that as "Invisible" would be its own overstatement.
Added August 2026, after a real site scored 59/100 and was reported as "Visible" while it was not being indexed at all. Calling a delisted site visible is the one thing this scorer must never do, so it no longer can. This block is never withheld — it shows on the free check, not just the paid inspection.
What the free score doesn't measure
Anything off your website: Google Business Profile quality, reviews, directory consistency, and what engines actually answer when asked about your market. The off-site checks are part of the $99 Site Inspection; live answer tracking is the $29/mo Tracker. The free check tells you where you stand on-page — honestly, in two minutes.
Questions
What does an AI visibility score measure?
The RankOps score reads a live website the way AI engines do and grades 17 on-page signals across three groups: whether the site is found and readable (26 points), whether it carries the signals AI answers cite (44 points), and whether it's locally discoverable (30 points). Scores map to five tiers from Invisible (under 30) to Dominant (85 and up).
Why are FAQ and business schema weighted highest?
Because they're the two signals most directly tied to being quoted: business schema tells an engine who and where you are with certainty, and FAQ markup hands it a ready-made answer in your words. Together they're worth 19 of the 44 citation-signal points.
What doesn't the free score measure?
Anything off your website: Google Business Profile quality, reviews, directory consistency, and what AI engines actually say when asked. Those off-site checks are part of the paid Site Inspection, and live answer tracking is what the AI Citation Tracker does monthly.