# Questions people ask first

Last updated October 2026. Something missing? [hello@readinessindex.io](mailto:hello@readinessindex.io).

What the scanner reads, what we keep, what it costs and how to turn it off. The numbers on this page are read from the same place as the rest of the site, so they cannot drift from it.

## The score and the scan

### What do you scan?

A public website, for one question: can machines (search engines, AI assistants and AI crawlers) find, read, trust and use it? We score the answer out of 100 against the [AI Readiness Index](https://readinessindex.io/open-standard), an open standard of 51 tests in 7 dimensions.

What the scanner reads is what any visitor or crawler could read: your home page, `robots.txt`, `llms.txt`, your sitemap, a handful of well-known paths and the HTML of the pages it samples. It renders pages in a headless browser to compare what a crawler sees against what a person sees.

It does not submit forms, log in, follow links behind a login or fetch anything it was not pointed at. It reads, and that is all.

### What is the difference between the free scan, the free report and a paid plan?

**The Primary Indicators scan** is free, needs no account, and reads your home page against 13 of the tests that most often decide the result.

**The full report** is free with a free account. It reads up to 10 pages, runs all 51 tests the scanner can measure from outside, ranks every fix, and comes with 5 rescans. It is yours for one site, for life.

**A paid plan** watches your site every Monday, tells you when the score moves, and reads more pages across more sites.

### How long does a scan take, and how hard does it hit my site?

A free scan makes about fourteen requests over a few seconds. A full scan is slower on purpose: one request every few seconds per site, with one worker. If your server answers 429 or 503 the scanner backs off, and if that does not help it gives up on the site instead of retrying into a wall. There is also a hard cap on requests per run, and reaching it ends the run.

If AIRBot ever looks like load to you, that is a bug on our side. Write to us and we will fix it. The details are on the [AIRBot page](https://readinessindex.io/bot).

### What does my score mean?

A score is three things, and we show all three together.

1. **The score, 0 to 100.** A weighted number across the Index’s dimensions.
2. **The gate status.** If your `robots.txt` blocks AI crawlers or your CDN turns them away, the report says so beside the score. A site can be well built and still unreachable. Those are different problems with different fixes, so we do not blend them.
3. **The automated coverage.** The share of the score the scanner verified on its own. Some tests cannot be seen from outside and are marked as such. A score of 82 with 91% coverage is a stronger claim than 82 with 64%.

### Is a high score a guarantee that AI assistants will cite my site?

No. A score is a measurement of what the tests found on the day we ran them. It is not a promise about how any particular AI system will treat your site later, and it is not legal, accessibility or compliance advice. What a high score does mean is that you have removed the avoidable reasons a machine would pass you over, and you can show your work.

### Why did my score change when I did nothing?

There are three honest reasons. Your site changed (a deploy, a CDN rule, a plugin update). A third party changed (a crawler’s behavior, a DNS record). Or the Index changed. A major version bump means the weights or the scoring model moved, and **old and new scores cannot be compared**. Every report shows which Index version scored it, and the changelog in the [standard](https://readinessindex.io/open-standard) says what moved.

### Can you show me why a test failed, and how to fix it?

Yes. Every test has a plain-language question, a link to the standard or documentation that backs it, and who usually fixes it (a developer, a content editor, marketing and so on). The full report ranks the fixes. You can export them as a Markdown backlog or a CSV for your tracker.

### What are “money URLs”?

The pages that matter most to your business: the ones where a visitor becomes a customer, a donor, an applicant or a lead. Think pricing, contact, apply, donate, book, or a product or service page. In the product they are also called **key pages**.

They count **double** in your score. A failure on your `/apply` page should cost more than the same failure on a 2019 press release, and naming those pages is how you tell the scanner which is which.

You do not have to find them first. On a free scan we guess from your navigation (links such as Contact, Apply, Donate, Pricing, Book and Get started), and your free report identifies 1 for you. On a paid plan you choose them. They are **pooled**, so you place them across your sites however you like.

### Can I scan a site that is not mine, such as a competitor's?

Only if you have the right to have it crawled and evaluated: you own it, work on it, or have the owner’s permission. Our [terms](https://readinessindex.io/terms) ask you not to use the tool to probe or gather information about a site you have no relationship to, and we may refuse, rate-limit or block a scan we think is used that way.

To put a site on weekly monitoring you prove you control it by adding a DNS TXT record at `_readinessindex.<your-host>`.

### Is there a limit on how many scans I can run?

Yes. The free scan is limited per address (20 an hour) and per site (10 an hour), so one person or one domain cannot tie the tool up for everyone else. A paid plan has a monthly rescan allowance that resets on your billing date, and weekly monitoring never spends it.

## Our crawler and your robots.txt

### Will you honor my robots.txt?

Yes, with one rule worth knowing about, stated plainly because a strict reading of the standard would call it wrong.

**Name us and we stop.** Add this and AIRBot takes nothing from your site:

```
User-agent: AIRBot
Disallow: /
```

We record that we were turned away, which still scores the `robots.txt` test because that is the one file we always fetch, and we take nothing else. No appeal, no exception.

**A blanket `User-agent: *` disallow does not stop us.** That rule is aimed at the anonymous scrape: no name, no published policy, nobody to write to. AIRBot identifies itself, publishes [what it does](https://readinessindex.io/bot) and stops the moment you say its name. We would rather be turned off by a decision than by a default nobody has revisited in a decade.

We still honor `Crawl-delay` under `*`. A rate limit is not an exclusion, and being slower costs us nothing. Any path you disallow for AIRBot is honored on every request the run makes, whatever user agent that request carries.

### How do I recognize AIRBot in my logs?

Every request carries `AIRBot/2.0 (+https://readinessindex.io/bot)` as its user agent, and most carry a `From` header with an address you can write to. Searching your logs for `AIRBot` finds all of it.

### Why did I see GPTBot, ClaudeBot and other crawler names from you?

One of the tests asks whether AI crawlers can actually reach your site. Your `robots.txt` states an intention. Your CDN states a fact, and the two disagree more often than anyone expects. The only way to measure that is to ask. On up to ten of the pages we already fetched, we send a request carrying each AI crawler’s product token and record what comes back: the status code, the size, and whether we got a challenge page instead of your content.

Those requests still identify us (an `X-Audit-Operator: AIRBot/2.0` header and the same `From` address). Each one is checked against AIRBot’s own rules first, so if you told AIRBot to stay away, no probe is sent under anyone’s name.

### Do you scan sites that block AI crawlers?

We report it. That is the point of the first two tests, and the report marks such a site as **gated**. Blocking AI crawlers is a legitimate choice. The Index tells you whether your site’s actual behavior matches the choice you meant to make.

## Your data

### Do you store my data?

Yes, the minimum needed to run the service, and less for the free scan than for the rest.

| When you | We keep |
| --- | --- |
| Run a free scan | The URL, your IP address and browser, and the time. No name, email or account. |
| Use the browser extension | The hostname of the page (never the path, the query string, the content, your history or your other tabs), your IP and browser, the time, and a label saying the scan came from the extension. The extension stores nothing on your device and sets no cookies. |
| Ask for the full report | Your name, company and email, optionally a page to weight more heavily, and the scan itself. |
| Sign in | Your email address and a stable account identifier. There is no password: we email you a six-digit code. |
| Scan on an account | Every scan with its per-test results and evidence, so you keep a trend line. |
| Write to us | Your name, email and message. |

We use the first row to run the scan and to stop abuse, and for nothing else. The whole policy is at [/privacy](https://readinessindex.io/privacy).

### Do you sell my data?

No, never. We do not sell or rent personal information, we run no ad-retargeting scripts, and we do not build an advertising profile of you.

### Who else sees my information?

A short list of services, each of which sees only what it needs to do its job. WorkOS sends and checks your sign-in code. SendGrid delivers the mail we send you. Cloudflare answers the human check on the contact form and sees your browser and address, nothing you type. Slack gets an internal TEN7 notification that a scan finished or a report was asked for. Fly.io hosts the application and the data. Stripe takes payment from paying customers, so card details go to Stripe and never to us. Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics measure which pages get used. RB2B is covered in the next answer. The full list is at [/privacy](https://readinessindex.io/privacy).

### What is RB2B, and why does it appear on my result page?

RB2B is a visitor-recognition service that runs on the page that shows a scan’s result. For some visitors it can tell us who they are: a name, a work email, an employer and a LinkedIn profile. We use that to follow up with people who ran a scan and to see which organizations use the tool, and for nothing else. If you would rather we did not hold it, write to [hello@readinessindex.io](mailto:hello@readinessindex.io) and we will delete it.

### How long do you keep my data, and can I have it deleted?

We keep scan history and contact details for as long as they are useful for the purpose you gave them: running the scan, answering your question, or keeping a saved account’s history intact. On an account your history stays until you ask for it to go, because the trend is the product.

Write to [hello@readinessindex.io](mailto:hello@readinessindex.io) to ask what we have, to correct it, or to have it deleted. When an account is deleted, the person is locked out at once and the personal data is erased after a thirty-day window, so a mistake can still be undone.

### Who can see my scan results?

You, and the members of your organization if you are in one. A result page is a link you can share with anyone you choose. You can also give another person read-only access to a client’s sites without giving them a seat. Anything we read from a scanned site is treated as data and never as instructions, including when an AI assistant reads it for you through our integration.

## Pricing and billing

### Why is it free?

Because the Index is a standard, and a standard is only useful if people can check themselves against it. TEN7, an agency in Minnesota, built it and publishes the tests under CC BY-SA 4.0. The free scan and the first full report are how you find out whether your site has a problem worth fixing. More pages, weekly monitoring, more sites and a team are what we charge for.

We will also say what we get in return. People who run a scan are people who care how their site works for machines, and if you ask for the full report we may follow up with you once about what we found. We do not add you to a mailing list.

### Is there a free trial?

The free report is the trial: a real scan of your site, with ranked fixes and 5 rescans, for nothing and with no card. Basic and Pro have no separate trial, and neither needs a contract.

### What does it cost?

| Plan | Price | Sites | Pages, pooled | Key pages, pooled | Rescans a month |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Primary Indicators scan | $0 | Any | 1 | None | None |
| Full report | $0 | 1, for life | 10 | 1 | 5, for life |
| Basic | $10 a month | 1 | 100 | 3 | 10 |
| Pro | $25 a month | 3 | 300 | 10 | 25 |
| Organization | $1,000 a month while we are launching ($2,500 list) | 25 | 5,000 | 200 | 100 |

Billing is monthly. The Organization plan also gives you a client roster and one flat price however many people are on your team. Every number here is the one on the [pricing page](https://readinessindex.io/pricing).

### What does “pooled” mean?

Your pages and key pages belong to your plan, not to one site. A ten-page site and a four-hundred-page site should not get the same allowance, so you spread the pool across your sites however you like (say 60 on the shop and 40 on the blog) and move them whenever you want.

### Can I cancel?

Yes, any time, from the billing portal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the period you have paid for. There is no cancellation fee and no contract.

**Nobody loses a report.** Every scan, score and trend line stays readable for as long as your account exists. The only thing that stops is weekly monitoring, because crawling costs money every Monday. Subscribe again and it resumes.

### Do you refund?

Cancel before your renewal date and you are not charged again. If something went wrong with a charge, write to [hello@readinessindex.io](mailto:hello@readinessindex.io) and a person will look at it.

### Can I change plans?

Yes, from the same billing portal. Changes are prorated: you are credited for what you have not used and charged for what you gain.

### What happens if my card fails?

Weekly monitoring pauses during a short retry window, not at once, because most failed cards are an expiry date and not an intention. Fix the card in the billing portal and it resumes. If every retry fails the subscription is canceled, and your reports stay readable.

### What are scan packs, page packs and MCP access?

Extras for when your plan runs out of something, all listed under Extras on the [pricing page](https://readinessindex.io/pricing#extras). A **scan pack** is $5 for 10 rescans and never expires. A **page pack** adds 1,000 pages to your pool for $100 a month. **MCP access** is $25 a month and lets your AI assistant read your scores.

## Teams, agencies and integrations

### Can I use this for my clients?

Yes, on the Organization plan. It bills the organization and not the seat, so adding or removing a teammate is never a billing event. Each client has its own domains, and you can give a client read-only access to their own sites without giving them a seat. Watching a client’s site every week needs the DNS record described above, so one agency’s record never vouches for a site under someone else’s account. The plan allows 25 sites.

### Can my AI assistant read my scores?

Yes. Our [MCP endpoint](https://readinessindex.io/mcp-docs) lets Claude or another Model Context Protocol client list your sites, read your scores, fetch the next fixes to make and get a fix prompt for a single test. Sign in with your account, or use an API key for read-only access. A key’s secret is shown once and stored only as a hash.

### Is there a browser extension?

Yes. Click its icon and it sends the hostname of the page you are on (not the path, the content or your history) and opens the Primary Indicators result in a new tab. It does nothing until you click.

### Can I run the scanner myself?

The standard is open under CC BY-SA 4.0: copy it, adapt it and build your own scanner from it, free, forever, as long as you credit TEN7 and share alike. The scanner that computes our scores is separate, proprietary software. See [/license](https://readinessindex.io/license).

## About us

### Who is behind this?

TEN7, an agency in Minnesota. We score our own site against the Index and publish the result at [/our-scan](https://readinessindex.io/our-scan), next to a hand-built [reference implementation](https://readinessindex.io/reference-scan). Both are rescanned every night.

### How do I reach a person?

Write to [hello@readinessindex.io](mailto:hello@readinessindex.io), or use the [contact form](https://readinessindex.io/about#say-hello).