What SmoothSeen checks, and what it does with what it finds
Every analysis gives two scores from 0 to 100. Web ranking measures what Google needs to crawl, understand and show a page. AI ranking measures whether an AI assistant can pull an answer out of it and trust it as a source. And it tells you what to fix first and which of your competitors already does it.
- Scores
- Two, from 0 to 100: web and AI
- Web ranking
- 8 categories
- AI ranking
- 18 categories in 4 groups
- Plans
- The same checks on all of them; on Free, both scores and the summary
On this page
Web ranking
What a search engine needs to reach the page, understand it and show it properly. The checks are grouped into these categories:
- Security and trust
- HTTPS, security headers and email authentication. A browser warning costs more visits than any optimisation gains.
- Crawling and indexing
- Whether search engines can reach the page, understand it, and tell which version is the canonical one.
- Content
- What Google reads to work out what the page is about: title, description, headings and enough text.
- Speed
- How long the page takes to respond, render and react. LCP, INP and CLS are the Core Web Vitals Google uses for ranking; TTFB, FCP and TBT help explain why they fail.
- Technical optimisation
- Page weight: images, CSS and JavaScript that can be trimmed without changing anything the visitor sees.
- Structured data
- The markup that describes the page to search engines and social networks: rich results (stars, prices, breadcrumbs), the preview when it is shared, and the elements that identify it.
- Mobile and accessibility
- Google indexes the mobile version first. This also covers barriers that stop people using the page with a keyboard or screen reader.
- Links and authority
- How many sites link to the domain, the state of its own links, and whether traffic is being measured.
AI ranking
These are two different questions. AEO: can an answer be taken from the page without reading all of it? GEO: why would a model choose it as a source when writing its own answer? The categories are grouped into four blocks.
Extractability (AEO)
Whether the answer sits where an extractor looks for it, in a format it can copy as it is.
- Direct answer
- Whether the page answers the question in its opening paragraphs. An assistant quotes what it can extract without reading the whole page.
- Structure for AI
- Headings and semantic HTML that let a model tell which part of the page answers what.
- Extractable format
- Summaries, tables of contents, FAQs, lists and a question-and-answer tone: the blocks an assistant can quote as they are, plus the llms.txt that tells it what to read.
- Readability
- Sentences and vocabulary a model — and a person in a hurry — can process without rereading.
Credibility (GEO)
Why a model would trust the page, and whether AI assistants' search crawlers can get in.
- Citable facts
- Concrete figures, dates and prices. A model cites what it can verify before it cites generic claims.
- Sources and citations
- Links to external sources and attributed quotes: what separates documented content from opinion.
- Domain authority
- The site’s accumulated reputation, measured by who links to it.
- Freshness
- A visible published or reviewed date. Without one, an assistant cannot tell whether the fact still holds.
- Authorship and experience
- Who signs it and with what credentials. The E-E-A-T signal that weighs most on sensitive topics.
- Data consistency
- That what the page says matches what directories and external listings say.
- AI markup
- Structured data (Schema) that explicitly declares what the content is about.
- AI engine access
- Which AI crawlers robots.txt lets in. Blocking the search ones (OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot…) can take you out of their answers; blocking the training ones (GPTBot, ClaudeBot…) does not take you out of ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity, and it is a legitimate choice.
Coverage
Whether there is enough content and it resolves what people are looking for.
- Topic coverage
- Whether the page genuinely resolves the search intent or merely mentions it.
Specific to the page type
Each page is classified as a product page, a catalogue, a local business, an article or undeclared, and is only asked for what belongs to its type: a product page is not asked for an author byline.
- Product page
- Price, availability, ratings and a description of its own: what an assistant needs to recommend a purchase.
- Local business
- Address, opening hours, coordinates and a Google Business profile, to show up in searches with local intent.
- Catalogue
- Browsable categories, shipping and returns on the shop front page.
- Service or application
- Prices or plans, ratings and contact details of a service or an application: what an assistant needs to recommend it.
- Page type
- What this page is: a product page, a catalogue, a local business or an article. If it never says, an assistant cannot place it and has no idea which questions it would answer.
Local business
A page counts as a local business if it declares LocalBusiness markup (or one of its subtypes) or has a Google Business Profile confirmed on its own domain. The local checks are then added: what an assistant needs to answer “where is it?” or “is it open now?”.1
- Local business
- Address, opening hours, coordinates and a Google Business profile, to show up in searches with local intent.
- Data consistency
- That what the page says matches what directories and external listings say.
1The Google profile only counts if the website it declares is on the same domain as the page analysed. A news outlet does not count as a local business even if the company has premises.
Online shops
A shop has two kinds of page and each is measured on its own terms. The product page, on what an assistant needs to recommend the purchase. The home page or catalogue, on what it needs to answer “where do I buy this?”.
- Product page
- Price, availability, ratings and a description of its own: what an assistant needs to recommend a purchase.
- Catalogue
- Browsable categories, shipping and returns on the shop front page.
Action plan
The findings from both scores, turned into a task list ordered from most to least serious: where to start, and how to argue for it in front of the client.
- Ordered by what matters most to fix, grouped by area.
- Each task says what to do and why it matters, in language you can show your client.
- If you have measured competitors, which of them already meet each task.
- Separately, what isn't a task but changes how search engines and assistants see you.
Competitor comparison
From the Professional plan
Up to 3 competitors per client, measured with the same checks as your site. The result is not a table of scores: it is what they meet and you do not, ordered by how many of them meet it.2
- They are suggested from who appears on Google for the queries the analysis simulates for your page. You can change them by hand.
- Your competitors go through the same checks as your site, so the comparison is fair.
- Your advantages also appear, and so does what none of them meet: the chance to be the only one that has it.
- Each competitor analysed uses one analysis from the monthly quota, but it does not appear in your client list.
2Gaps are ordered first by how many competitors already pass the check.
Before and after
What changed between two analyses of the same client: what was fixed, what is new and what is still pending. It answers “what did you do this month?” better than a score that goes up a few points.
- You can compare with any of the 12 previous analyses of the same client; by default, the one immediately before.
- Both analyses are compared with the same yardstick: what changes is your site, not the ruler.
- You see what was fixed, what is new and what is still pending.
PDF reports and a share link
From the Professional plan
The report leaves the dashboard in two ways, with the same data you see on screen, from the Professional plan. On Professional they carry the SmoothSeen brand; on Agency, yours.
- Four documents: web ranking, AI ranking, competitor comparison and action plan.
- Link
- An address your client opens without an account, with the web, AI and action plan views and their PDF download. Search engines do not index it, you can see how many times it has been opened, and you can revoke it: it stops working for good.
White label
On the Agency and Enterprise plans
Deliver reports under your agency’s brand instead of ours.
- Name, logo, main colour, website and contact email. Any field you leave empty uses SmoothSeen’s.
- It applies to the PDFs, to the share link (with the brand of the agency that owns the report, not of whoever opens it) and to the monitoring alert email.
- You can switch it off whenever you like: reports go back to carrying the SmoothSeen brand.
Scheduled monitoring
From the Professional plan
Each client is re-analysed on its own, without you having to remember: monthly on Professional, weekly on Agency and daily on Enterprise.
- You choose which page is watched. If you choose none, it is the last one you analysed for that client.
- If the web or AI score drops by 5 points or more against the previous analysis of that page, you get an email with the drop and a link to the report. Analyses you run by hand do not send alerts.3
- Each automatic analysis uses one from the monthly quota. If there is none left, it is skipped until the quota renews.
3Below 5 points the movement is measurement noise: real-user data changes on its own and PageSpeed varies from one run to the next.