--- title: "Every Free AI Readiness Checker, Compared, Including The Ones That Beat Ours" url: https://hostmy.blog/ai-readiness-checker-comparison/ date: 2026-09-04 modified: 2026-09-03 lang: en author: "Aditya Sharma" description: "Fourteen free AI readiness checkers exist. Two of them do something ours cannot. Here is the honest map of what each one tests." categories: - "RankReady" image: https://hostmy.blog/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/hmb-card-1833-1024x538.jpg word_count: 1529 --- # Every Free AI Readiness Checker, Compared, Including The Ones That Beat Ours There are fourteen free AI readiness checkers you can run against a URL right now. Most of them give you a score, a list of red crosses and a signup form. A comparison that ends with "and ours wins everything" is worth nothing, and you would be right not to believe it. So this one names the two tools that do something we cannot, explains what that something is, and then explains where the whole category, ours included, stops short. What fourteen free readiness checkers look at What fourteen free readiness checkers look at Tested by most of the fourteen robots.txt present llms.txt present A schema block exists Meta tags exist One to three URLs, usually the homepage Tested by none of the fourteen Sentence length against the 18 word ceiling - Whether the claim sits in the first 30% of the page Whether a named crawler received a 200 The deep posts that carry the citations Homepages were cited about 4% of the time, and the homepage is the page most of these tools scan. The tools agree on the file-presence questions and none of them opens the pages that actually get quoted. ## The fourteen, and what most of them actually check The set, as it stands: Search Engine Land, Cloudflare at isitagentready.com, Frase, SiteSpeakAI, GEO Metrics, LLMClicks, RankPrompt, SEOJuice, LLM Pulse, Sourceable, Chat Thing, Custom Web Audits, llmstxtgenerator.de, and acceptmarkdown.com. Most of them do the same thing. They fetch a URL, check for the presence of a handful of files and tags, and return a verdict. Does robots.txt exist. Is there an llms.txt. Is there schema. Is the page reachable without JavaScript. That is a useful five minute triage. It is not an audit, and the difference matters more than the scores do. The shorter list of [signals an assistant weighs before quoting a page](/ai-seo-checker-curl/) overlaps with it only partly. ## Two of them do something ours does not, and here is what **Search Engine Land's checker is the only one in the set that queries an actual language model.** Everything else, ours included, inspects your site and infers. That tool goes and asks. That is a categorically different piece of evidence, because it tells you something about the model's behaviour rather than about your HTML. If you want to know whether an assistant will say anything about your brand at all, that check is closer to the truth than any file inspection, and no plugin sitting inside WordPress can do it. Paid [prompt monitoring services](/ai-visibility-tools/) sell a continuous version of the same evidence. **Cloudflare's isitagentready.com is the most rigorous infrastructure test in the set.** It runs 20 checks and returns a Level from 0 to 5 rather than a percentage, which is a more honest output format than a number out of 100. Being run by the company that sees a large share of the world's crawler traffic gives its checks a grounding that a plugin author cannot claim. One caveat worth knowing before you read your result: its default scan does not check llms.txt at all, so an absent llms.txt is not what is holding your Level down. There is a third worth naming. **acceptmarkdown.com tests four RFC criteria properly**: whether Markdown is served when the client asks for it, whether Vary: Accept is set, whether unsupported types get a 406, and whether q-values are honoured in both directions. That is a specification conformance test, not a checklist. It is the most precise single tool in the group, and it is the one whose result is hardest to fake. | Tool | What it does better than the rest | Worth knowing | | ---- | --------------------------------- | ------------- | | Search Engine Land | Queries a real language model | The only one in the set that does | | Cloudflare, isitagentready.com | 20 infrastructure checks, Level 0 to 5 | Default scan skips llms.txt entirely | | acceptmarkdown.com | Four RFC criteria for content negotiation | Narrow scope by design, and precise inside it | | llmstxtgenerator.de | Ships a WordPress plugin, not just a scan | Paid, 4.90 to 19.90 euro per month | | GEO Metrics | Split content analysis into a separate product | So the free checker does not include it | llmstxtgenerator.de deserves the mention because it is the one that made the same architectural decision we did. Its WordPress plugin, aiready-llms-txt-generator, detects noindex across Yoast, Rank Math, SEOPress and AIOSEO, which is the kind of detail you only build after actually running on real sites. It costs 4.90 to 19.90 euro per month. ## What none of the fourteen do, including the good ones Four limits run across the entire set. They are not flaws in any one tool. They are what the category has not built yet, and they map closely onto [the parts of AI SEO that get sold dishonestly](/what-ai-seo-means/). **None of them do passage level or sentence level content analysis.** Every one checks files, headers, tags and structure. None reads your sentences. GEO Metrics is the tell here: it split content analysis out into a separate product, which is a fair admission that the two jobs are different sizes. **None of them write the fix.** They tell you what is missing. Closing the gap is your afternoon, your developer, or your host. **Most scan one to three URLs per site.** A verdict drawn from your homepage says very little about the 400 posts that make up your actual citation surface. Homepages were cited about 4 percent of the time in a large citation sample, so the page most tools scan is the page least likely to be quoted. **Thirteen of fourteen tool pages never mention WordPress.** The advice comes back as edit your robots.txt, add a file at the root, set a response header. On WordPress that is not one instruction, it is three, and the robots.txt is virtual so the obvious approach often does not win. Whether any of it took effect is a question [five curl commands sent as a crawler](/ai-crawler-test/) will answer. ## Why the missing content check is the expensive gap Here is why the fourth column of every scanner is the one that would matter most if it existed. Across 11,346 cited sentences a study could extract, the mean cited sentence ran 9.27 words. Nothing longer than 18 words was cited even once. The 6 to 10 word band carried 45.2 percent of everything. And 41.9 percent of citations came from the first 30 percent of the page. Sequential heading structure showed up 2.8 times more often on cited pages. So the unit that gets quoted is a short sentence near the top of a page with clean heading order. Not one scanner in the set measures that. You can pass every check in all fourteen tools and still have no quotable sentence anywhere on the page. The measurements are set out in [the citation record that produced the ceiling](/18-word-ceiling/). ## How to actually use them, in order Running all fourteen is a waste of an evening. Three of them cover the ground. Run acceptmarkdown.com against one post. It is precise and it is the only one that verifies content negotiation properly. - Run Cloudflare's checker for the infrastructure picture. Read the Level, and remember the default scan ignores llms.txt. - Run Search Engine Land's checker for the one piece of model side evidence available to you. - Then check a page that is not your homepage. Most tools will not do this for you, and it is where your citations would come from. - Then read your own opening paragraph and count the words in each sentence. Steps four and five are the ones no tool covers and the ones most likely to change anything. Our own findings from reading through the whole set are in [we read 14 free AI readiness checkers](/ai-readiness-checkers/), and the manual version of the audit, run with curl and nothing else, is in [the five layer AI SEO audit](/five-layer-ai-seo-audit/). ## Where a plugin fits, and where it does not A scanner tells you what is wrong. It stops there because it lives outside your site and has no way in. RankReady is a WordPress AI SEO plugin that sits on the other side of that line. It runs inside WordPress, so instead of reporting that Markdown is not served, it serves it: content negotiation with correct Vary handling, a Markdown version of each URL, per crawler AI controls, crawler logging, summary and FAQ blocks near the top of a post, schema output and freshness signals. It runs alongside Rank Math, Yoast, AIOSEO and SEOPress. Tested against all four on WordPress 7.1, there was no duplicate schema, exactly one canonical, and nothing of theirs modified. Setup takes about five minutes. What it cannot do is the thing Search Engine Land's checker does. It cannot ask a model about you. Nothing installed on your server can. Keep that tool in your kit alongside whatever you install, because the two answer different questions. It changes whether machines can reach and parse your content. It does not promise citations, rankings or visibility. You can find it at [RankReady on WordPress.org](https://wordpress.org/plugins/rankready-ai-llm-seo/). ## The check nobody is selling Every tool in this comparison, ours included, is measuring the container. The thing being quoted is a nine word sentence in your first three paragraphs. So when a checker hands you a green score, what have you actually learned about the sentence a model would lift from your best post?