Field guides
Notes from measuring a lot of websites: what the readings keep showing, which signals actually move a number, and where the thermometer itself has been wrong.
Answer-first is 25 words, and three tools had to agree on how to count them
In September 2026 two checkers in this portfolio reported different word counts for the same page. The cause was a function nobody had looked at in a year, and fixing it changed how every number in the family is produced.
Seventeen sites, one thermometer, and three results that did not fit
The first run of the published readings dataset produced three results that argue against the instrument that produced them. Hacker News at 47. MDN at 29 for entity strength. The site that publishes the federation specification at 74, on 255 words.
The heaviest signal on the whole scale is one line of a text file
Sixteen of the seventy-five points in the AI Discoverability reading come down to whether robots.txt lets AI crawlers in. No other single signal in the registry is worth that much, and most people have not read theirs since 2023.
The page that scored zero, and why that is the right answer
Example.com returns 21 words and scores zero for Content and Entity Strength. It is also a perfectly working page doing exactly its job. Both of those are true and the scale has to hold them at the same time.
What a thermometer cannot see, and why I published that on the tool
Hacker News reads 47 degrees. Wikipedia reads 81 with an AI reading of 65. Any instrument that measures one page from outside has a specific, nameable blind spot, and hiding it would cost more than admitting it.
Why a good site from 2019 reads hot for search and cold for AI
The most common shape in the readings is a site scoring in the eighties for Search Visibility and the forties for AI Discoverability. Nothing it did was wrong when it was built. That is the whole problem.