What should my site tell AI crawlers?
AI signals is about what you tell AI clients once they are in: your rules for each kind of bot, how your content may be used, and where to find your sitemap and llms.txt. It matters to a machine because it can only respect a preference it can read, and a stated rule is the difference between a choice you made and an accident it has to guess at. Below are the 3 checks in this course, what each one looks for, and what good looks like. We can read what you declare; we can't see whether a given AI company honours it.
All 3 checks count toward your headline score.
The checks in this course
3 checksAI bot rules are explicit and intentional
Should I allow or block AI crawlers?A deliberate allow/deny per bot (separating training bots from search bots from user-fetchers) reads as maturity and avoids accidental blocks.
What good looks like An explicit allow/disallow per AI crawler that matches your actual intent.
Read more about AI bot rulesContent usage preferences declared
What is Content-Signal in robots.txt?Content-Signal directives (search / ai-input / ai-train) let you state how your content may be used by AI.
What good looks like Clear Content-Signal directives that reflect your policy.
Read more about content usage preferencesResource-discovery Link headers
What are Link headers, and how do they help AI agents?Link: rel=describedby / sitemap headers help agents discover your llms.txt and sitemap without parsing HTML.
What good looks like A Link header advertising your sitemap and (if present) llms.txt.
Read more about discovery Link headersWords you'll meet here
How does your page read to a machine?
A free scan checks these 3 and everything else in about 20 seconds — no signup.
Rather have it handled? No pitch, just a plain-English chat.
Book a call