AI + Search Exposure Inspection

Discovery Signal

Anything observable that affects whether a machine can reach a page at all, before any question of quality comes up.

Also known as Findability signal. Updated .

What it means

HTTPS, crawler permissions, indexing directives, canonical declarations, redirect behavior, sitemap availability, server response time. This group answers one question: can it be reached. Everything else on a page is moot until the answer is yes.

The part a short definition leaves out

Discovery problems are the cheapest to fix and the most expensive to ignore. A single robots.txt line can cost a site every AI citation it would otherwise have earned, and it costs about eight seconds to correct.

Related terms

  • robots.txt A plain text file at the site root telling crawlers which parts of the site they may request.
  • XML Sitemap A machine-readable list of the URLs on a site that its owner wants crawled.
  • noindex A directive, in a meta tag or an HTTP header, telling search systems to keep this page out of their index.

See whether this is costing you anything

The inspection reports on this signal directly, alongside thirty-seven others, and tells you whether it is a quick fix on your site or something deeper.

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