Frequently asked questions

Benchmarq audits how ready your website is for AI crawlers, answer engines, and increasingly, AI agents acting on a user's behalf. It scans your domain across four core readiness tracks (CORE for the technical performance foundation everything else depends on, AIO for AI Index Optimization which determines whether AI crawlers can reach and parse your content, AEO for Answer Engine Optimization to ensure clean, extractable facts and agent-friendly page structure, and GEO for Generative Engine Optimization which measures the citation and trust signals generative engines look for), plus optional Agentic Readiness (ARO) and Agentic Commerce (ACO) tracks on higher plans, and returns a single readiness score along with the issues behind it.

No. Benchmarq is a crawler verification utility. We verify that search agents can parse your domain, but we do not submit index queries to third-party databases on your behalf.

CORE (labelled "Core performance" on your report) is the technical performance foundation everything else depends on, covering HTTPS, security headers, real Core Web Vitals, and accessibility. AIO (AI Index Optimization, "Visibility in AI search") checks whether AI crawlers can actually reach and parse your content, covering crawler access rules, structured data, and on-page technical signals. AEO (Answer Engine Optimization, "Extractable facts") checks whether an AI agent gets clean, unambiguous facts from your pages, without conflicting metadata or clutter in the way. GEO (Generative Engine Optimization, labelled "Citation by LLMs" on your report) measures the trust and entity signals generative engines use to decide whether to cite you, such as author expertise, social proof, and brand consistency.

We recommend running an audit weekly, or after each code deployment, so your results stay aligned with evolving crawler definitions and your domain keeps its place in major answer-engine databases.

Your monthly scan quota and the number of domains you can track depend on your plan, and paid plans raise both. Your current limits and remaining scans are always shown on the dashboard and account pages.

Benchmarq checks your robots.txt and site behaviour against the major AI crawlers and answer-engine bots, including OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, GoogleOther, and Applebot, along with your general crawl-delay and disallow rules. This confirms whether an AI system is actually allowed to read your content before anything else about your readiness matters.

Yes, on Premium. The Competitive insights report tracks up to four competitor domains alongside yours and compares CORE, AIO, AEO, and GEO scores side by side (plus Agentic Readiness (ARO) and Agentic Commerce (ACO), where enabled), so you can see exactly where you're ahead or behind.

They're optional add-on scan modules on top of the core site audit, available from the Start a new scan screen. Agentic Readiness (ARO) checks whether AI agents can discover, authenticate with, and interact with your site. Agentic Commerce (ACO) checks whether an agent can actually transact with you: product data, checkout, and payment protocols. Agentic Readiness (ARO) is included from the Standard plan; Agentic Commerce (ACO) from Premium.

29 checks across five areas: agent discovery and documentation (7 checks, e.g. AGENTS.md and OpenAPI specs), authentication and access control (5 checks, including MCP authentication posture and Web Bot Auth), protocol and endpoint support (5 checks), agent-completable flows (9 checks, such as whether an agent can complete a search or contact form via WebMCP), and consistency checks (3 checks) that catch conflicting metadata an agent could get confused by.

27 checks across four areas: product and catalogue data (7 checks, including pricing, availability, and GTIN/MPN identifiers), checkout and payments (6 checks, including AP2 payment mandate discovery and agent-native checkout flows), order lifecycle (6 checks, including cancellation, modification, and webhooks), and protocol compliance (8 checks) for standards like ACP and UCP.

Agentic Readiness (ARO) checks are included from the Standard plan up. Agentic Commerce (ACO) checks are Premium only, since they build on top of the Agentic Readiness (ARO) layer. Free covers the core site suite only (CORE, AIO, AEO, and GEO).

AI agents are moving from reading pages to acting on them: filling in forms, checking availability, completing purchases, using emerging standards like MCP for tool access and AP2 for agent-initiated payments. If your site doesn't support those protocols, an agent working on a customer's behalf may not be able to find you, let alone check out. These checks test against protocols shipping today, not a generic "AI readiness" guess.

The Readiness Score is a weighted calculation evaluating your domain across CORE (technical performance foundation, including security headers and real Core Web Vitals), AIO (AI Index Optimization for whether AI crawlers can access and parse your content), AEO (Answer Engine Optimization for clean, extractable, agent-friendly page structure), and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization for citation and trust signals generative engines look for). On Standard and Premium, Agentic Readiness (ARO) and Agentic Commerce (ACO) scores are calculated the same way and shown alongside the four core tracks.

Each scan produces a report that breaks your score down by readiness track and lists every detected issue. Action items gathers the outstanding items across your domains so you can prioritise fixes, and trends charts how your scores move over time as you re-scan.

Alongside the 0–100 Readiness Score, each report shows a letter grade as a quick reference, similar to a school grade band, where a higher score maps to a better letter. Use the number to track precise movement between scans, and the letter for an at-a-glance read when sharing results with a non-technical stakeholder.

Every issue Benchmarq finds is tagged with a severity (Critical, High, Medium, or Low) and a status (Failed or Partial, depending on whether the check found nothing or found an incomplete signal). Open issues lets you filter by severity and by track (CORE, AIO, AEO, GEO) so you can work through the highest-impact fixes first.

Yes. Each report has a Download PDF option for a shareable summary, and a Download badge option that gives you a verification badge for your current readiness score.

Trends charts your CORE, AIO, AEO, and GEO scores over time as an overlay, alongside your average score and net progress across all your audit runs. Readiness milestones below the chart log each scan with its score and a short summary of what changed, so you can see the story behind the curve, not just the numbers.

You can upgrade from the pricing page, where prices are shown in euros, and existing subscribers manage or cancel their subscription through the secure customer portal, reachable from your account page. Plan changes are prorated automatically.

Start with this help centre, which covers getting started, crawler directives, and AEO optimisation. If you need more, reach out to our support team and we will help you get your domain AI-ready.

Free runs the core site suite (CORE, AIO, AEO, and GEO — 163 automated checks). Standard adds Agentic Readiness (ARO) checks (29 more, 192 total) that test whether AI agents can safely interact with your site. Premium adds Agentic Commerce (ACO) checks (27 more, 219 total) for whether agents can actually transact with you, plus historical tracking and competitive benchmarking.

Yes — switch between domains using the Active property selector at the top of the dashboard. How many properties you can track at once depends on your plan, shown as the Domains tracked limit on the pricing page.