Every check in the rubric carries an effort rating: Low, Medium or High. The rating is published alongside the point weight, and the scan report uses it to rank fixes so that cheap, valuable work rises to the top. But "Low" and "High" are labels, and this post is about what sits behind them: what the work actually involves, who does it, and roughly what it costs.
The short version is that the three tiers are hours, weeks and architecture. Thirteen checks are hours. Eleven are weeks. Three are architecture, and those three are where most of the money and most of the score movement live.
Low effort, thirteen checks, hours of work
These are the checks where the fix is a file you upload, a header you set, or a line you change in a template. Nobody needs to redesign anything.
- A1 robots.txt exists and parses (2 points)
- A2 major AI crawlers allowed (6)
- A3 XML sitemap valid and referenced (3)
- A4 llms.txt present (4)
- A5 bot user-agent HTTP health (3)
- B4 meta and Open Graph (3)
- B6 alt text coverage (2)
- B7 canonical and duplication hygiene (3)
- D1 transport security (4)
- D2 verifiable identity (4)
- D3 policies discoverable (4)
- D5 identity consistency (3)
- D6 security.txt (2)
Between them these thirteen checks are worth 43 points. That is close to half the rubric, available for work that a competent developer can complete in a day or two, and in most cases without a deploy of application code at all.
A2 is the single biggest item on the whole rubric at six points, and it is often fixed by editing one file. A5 is the one to check before anything else, because it catches edge and CDN layers that refuse bot user agents regardless of what robots.txt says, and the fix is a setting rather than code. A4 needs a real llms.txt with three or more described links; a bare list of URLs scores one point, so the work is writing the descriptions, not creating the file. D6 is a text file at /.well-known/security.txt with a future-dated Expires field.
Contact: mailto:security@example.com
Expires: 2027-09-04T00:00:00.000Z
Preferred-Languages: en
The reason this tier matters is not that any one check is large. It is that the whole tier can be done before a longer engagement starts, which is why we do it first and re-scan before touching anything expensive.
Medium effort, eleven checks, weeks of work
These checks require changes across templates rather than in single files, and the changes need to be right on every page the crawler visits, not just the homepage. That is what moves them from hours to weeks.
- A6 no hard interstitial (2 points)
- B1 JSON-LD present and valid (5)
- B2 correct schema types for the site type (5)
- B3 semantic HTML structure (4)
- B5 clean text ratio (3)
- C1 form usability (5)
- C2 navigable link graph (4)
- C3 interactive element semantics (4)
- C6 on-site search (3)
- D4 freshness signals (4)
- D7 multi-page stability (4)
Another 43 points. The pattern here is that each check depends on how your templates were built rather than on what files you serve. B1 wants a parseable JSON-LD block on the homepage and on at least half the crawled pages, and B2 wants the right types for your kind of site, so both are a job of wiring structured data into the layout and the page-type templates, then verifying it across the crawl. B3 wants exactly one h1, no skipped heading levels and real landmarks; that is often a component refactor rather than a content edit. C1 and C3 are about forms and buttons being what they claim to be: labelled inputs, correct input types, button elements rather than click-handled divs. C6 wants a search form that uses GET with a query parameter, so an agent can build the URL rather than drive the form.
A6 is the odd one out. Removing a cookie wall or a challenge screen is not technically hard, but it usually involves a conversation with legal or with whoever chose the consent vendor, and that is what makes it Medium rather than Low.
This tier is where an engagement typically spends most of its time, and where the implementation service delivers structured data across templates rather than page by page, as reviewable pull requests or documented CMS changes.
High effort, three checks, architecture
- A7 server-rendered content parity (5 points)
- C4 machine endpoints and agent manifests (5)
- C5 commerce actionability (4, commerce sites only)
Only 14 points between them, and for a non-commerce site C5's four points are redistributed across C1 to C4, so the tier is worth ten points to a non-commerce site. But the three checks are in a class of their own.
A7 compares the visible text in the raw HTML against the fully rendered DOM. A ratio at or above 0.8 scores full marks; below 0.5 scores zero, because an agent using a plain fetch sees essentially nothing. If your content only exists after hydration, no amount of schema or llms.txt will help, because the agent never receives the page you decorated. The fix is server rendering or prerendering for the routes that matter, and depending on the framework that can be a configuration change or a rewrite of the rendering layer. This is the most expensive work on the rubric and also the one with the largest downstream effect, because most of pillars B and C are measured on what the raw fetch returns.
C4 asks for any of an agents.json, an MCP or WebMCP manifest, a published API documentation link, or a discoverable OpenAPI spec. It is High effort because it involves building something that did not exist rather than fixing something that did. It is also the check where, in the scans we run, the usual result is zero, which is why we cover it separately.
C5 is checkout: product pages within two clicks of the homepage, price and availability in schema matching the page, a cart or checkout path returning 200 without login, and a guest or express checkout signal. On most commerce platforms that touches the part of the stack people are most nervous about changing.
What it costs
We scope engagements by architecture rather than by page count, because the tiers above are what determine the work and a fifty-page site with client-rendered templates is a bigger job than a five-thousand-page site with good server rendering.
An agent readiness audit runs every check by hand, attaches the captured evidence to each finding, and delivers a remediation plan ranked by impact against effort. It takes five business days and starts from $2,000. Implementation is typically $4,000 to $25,000 over two to eight weeks, again depending on architecture. Both are on the pricing page.
We will also say when something is not worth doing. A content site with no forms does not need C1 work, and a site that already renders on the server should not be sold an A7 project. An audit that recommends everything has not done its job.
Check your own site
The free scan lists your failed checks with their effort ratings, so you can see at a glance how much of your gap is hours and how much is architecture. For the checks in each tier, see the rubric's pillar A, pillar B, pillar C and pillar D tables.