Floors & Bonuses
TL;DR
Floors prevent inflated scores by capping your total when fundamental problems exist. Bonuses reward sites that demonstrate excellence across complementary factors. Together, they ensure scores reflect real-world AI readiness.
Last updated: 2026-03-09
What Floors Are#
A floor is a score cap that activates when your site has a critical problem that would undermine AI readiness regardless of how well you perform elsewhere. Think of floors as reality checks. If your site blocks all AI crawlers, it does not matter how good your schema markup is — AI systems cannot see it. Floors exist to prevent misleadingly high scores in these situations. When a floor is triggered, your final score cannot exceed a certain threshold until the underlying issue is resolved. Floors are the single most important thing to address first in any optimization effort because they limit how much benefit you can get from other improvements. Clearing a floor often produces the largest single jump in your score.
Conditions That Trigger Floors#
Six categories of critical problems can trigger score floors. Each represents a fundamental barrier to AI discovery:
- Deliberate AI blocking — Your site explicitly blocks AI crawlers through robots.txt rules, meta tags, or HTTP headers targeting known AI user agents. This is the most restrictive floor because it makes your site intentionally invisible.
- Blanket bot blocking — Your site blocks all bots indiscriminately, catching AI crawlers along with everything else. Even without targeting AI specifically, the effect on discoverability is severe.
- Extremely slow speed — Page load times are so high that AI crawlers time out or deprioritize your content. Speed is a threshold issue — you need to be fast enough, not the fastest.
- Poor crawl health — Widespread 4xx/5xx errors, broken redirects, or missing sitemaps prevent reliable access. If crawlers cannot navigate your site cleanly, your content does not get indexed.
- Zero schema — No structured data of any kind is present, leaving AI systems with no machine-readable context about what your pages represent.
- Zero authority — No external trust signals exist, making it impossible for AI systems to assess credibility. AI is increasingly selective about which sources it cites.
What Bonuses Are#
Bonuses reward sites that go beyond baseline competence and demonstrate excellence across complementary factors. When two or more factors work together synergistically, the combined effect on AI readiness is greater than the sum of the parts. Bonuses apply a multiplier to your weighted score when specific combinations of strong performance are detected. Unlike floors, bonuses are purely additive — they can only help your score, never hurt it. Not every site will earn bonuses, and that is fine. They represent best-in-class optimization, not baseline requirements. Earning even one bonus puts your site well ahead of the average. Learn about the individual factors at How Scoring Works.
Conditions That Earn Bonuses#
Five bonus categories reward complementary excellence:
- Protocol Trifecta — Earned when your site fully implements all major AI protocols, including
llms.txt, structured AI permissions, and supporting metadata. This demonstrates a comprehensive commitment to AI discoverability. - Schema + Content Foundation — Earned when both your structured data and content quality scores are high, giving AI systems rich machine-readable context backed by genuinely useful content.
- Full Authority — Earned when your authority and trust signals are comprehensive, including strong backlink profiles, verified entity information, and consistent brand presence.
- Bot + Protocol Synergy — Earned when your bot access configuration and AI protocols work together seamlessly, giving AI systems both permission and structured guidance to crawl your site.
- Transactional Readiness — Earned when your site is fully prepared for AI-driven actions like purchases, bookings, or signups, combining schema, content, and access factors.
Strategic Implications#
The floors-and-bonuses system creates a clear optimization hierarchy. First, clear any active floors. A single triggered floor can hold your score well below its potential, making all other work less effective. Second, strengthen your weakest factors to eliminate floor risk. Third, push your strongest factor pairs toward bonus thresholds. This sequence produces the fastest, most predictable score improvements. You can see which floors and bonuses are active for your site in your scan results. Each one includes a plain-language explanation and a link to the relevant fix guide. For the complete scoring model, see How Scoring Works.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Can multiple floors be active at the same time?
Yes. If multiple critical problems exist, multiple floors apply simultaneously. The most restrictive floor determines your effective score cap. Fixing any one floor will raise the cap, but the next-most-restrictive floor then takes over.
Do bonuses stack?
Yes. If your site qualifies for multiple bonuses, their effects combine. However, your total score is still capped at 100. In practice, earning two or three bonuses is a strong result that places you in the top tier.
Why are the exact cap values and multipliers not published?
Exact cap values and bonus multipliers are kept internal to protect the integrity of the scoring system and prevent gaming. The important thing is to clear floors entirely and pursue bonus conditions through genuine optimization. Your scan results tell you which floors are active and what to fix.
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