AX Rush

AI readiness of theguardian.com

Measured on the home page. Overall grade: Poor.

theguardian.com

Poor · 38 passing checks, 22 warnings, 6 failures · 1.8s

ax-audit@3.6.0

LLMs.txt

  • /llms.txt not found

    Create a /llms.txt file at your site root following the llmstxt.org specification. It should be a Markdown file starting with "# Your Site Name" and include a description, sections, and links.

Agent Card (A2A)

  • /.well-known/agent.json not found

    Create a /.well-known/agent.json file following the A2A (Agent-to-Agent) protocol. It should include name, description, url, and skills fields describing your site's capabilities.

OpenAPI Spec

  • /.well-known/openapi.json not found

    Create a /.well-known/openapi.json file with your API specification following the OpenAPI 3.x standard. See https://swagger.io/specification/ for the spec.

MCP (Model Context Protocol)

  • /.well-known/mcp.json not found

    Create a /.well-known/mcp.json file describing your MCP server configuration. Include name, description, tools, and version fields. See https://modelcontextprotocol.io for the spec.

AI Well-Known

  • 0/5 emerging AI discovery files published

  • ai.txt not found

    Publish /.well-known/ai.txt declaring opt-in/opt-out signals for AI training. See https://site.spawning.ai/spawning-ai-txt for the format.

  • genai.txt not found

    Publish /.well-known/genai.txt declaring your generative-AI usage policy.

  • ai-plugin.json not found

    Publish /ai-plugin.json (legacy ChatGPT plugin manifest). Schema: name_for_model, description_for_model, api.url. Still consumed by some agents.

  • agents.json not found

    Publish /agents.json describing your site as a callable agent (OpenAgents / Wildcard emerging spec). Includes name, description, and operations[].

  • nlweb.json not found

    Publish /.well-known/nlweb.json (Microsoft NLWeb) so agents can interact with the site through a natural-language interface.

Content NegotiationInformational

  • Homepage does not serve Markdown via content negotiation

    Serve a Markdown representation of your pages when agents request "Accept: text/markdown". Agents like Claude Code and Cursor ask for it, and Markdown cuts token usage by ~80% vs HTML. Cloudflare ("Markdown for Agents") and Vercel can enable this without code changes.

  • No <link rel="alternate" type="text/markdown"> fallback found on the homepage

    If you cannot enable content negotiation, advertise a Markdown version with <link rel="alternate" type="text/markdown" href="/index.md"> so agents can discover it.

Structured Data

  • No JSON-LD structured data found

    Add a <script type="application/ld+json"> block in your HTML <head> with schema.org structured data describing your site, organization, or person.

Robots.txt

  • /robots.txt exists

  • 4/8 core AI crawlers configured

    Add explicit User-agent entries for the missing crawlers with Allow: / for each one.

  • 17 AI crawler(s) explicitly blocked

    These crawlers have "Disallow: /" rules. If you want AI agents to access your site, change to "Allow: /" for each blocked crawler.

  • Sitemap directive present

  • No Content-Signal directive found (optional)

    Declare how crawlers may use your content after access with the Content Signals Policy, e.g.: Content-Signal: search=yes, ai-train=no. Known signals: search, ai-input, ai-train. Generate yours at contentsignals.org.

  • 17/48 known AI crawlers have explicit rules

Meta Tags

  • No AI meta tags (ai:*) found

    Add AI meta tags to your HTML <head>: <meta name="ai:summary" content="Brief description">, <meta name="ai:content_type" content="website">, <meta name="ai:author" content="Your Name">.

  • No rel="alternate" link to llms.txt in HTML

    Add to your <head>: <link rel="alternate" type="text/plain" href="/llms.txt" title="LLM-optimized content">

  • No rel="alternate" link to agent.json in HTML

    Add to your <head>: <link rel="alternate" type="application/json" href="/.well-known/agent.json" title="Agent Card">

  • No rel="me" identity links found

    Add rel="me" links to verify your identity across platforms: <link rel="me" href="https://github.com/yourname">, <link rel="me" href="https://twitter.com/yourname">.

  • No OpenGraph meta tags found

    Add at minimum og:title, og:description, og:url, og:type, and og:image. Agents and link previews depend on these.

  • Twitter Card required tags missing: twitter:card, twitter:title, twitter:description

    Add these meta tags: <meta name="twitter:card" content="...">, <meta name="twitter:title" content="...">, <meta name="twitter:description" content="...">.

HTML Rendering

  • Server-rendered content detected (3441 words, 20684 chars of visible text)

  • Low text-to-markup ratio (1.5%)

    A very low text-to-markup ratio is a typical SPA-shell symptom. Inline more content directly into the HTML response.

  • Semantic landmarks present (main, section, header, footer, nav)

  • No <h1> heading found

    Add a single <h1> describing the page. Agents and search engines treat the H1 as the primary topic indicator.

  • 126/127 <img> tags have alt attributes

Crawl EfficiencyInformational

  • Response compressed with gzip

  • Cache validator present (ETag)

  • Conditional request returned 200 instead of 304 Not Modified

    The server advertises a cache validator but does not honor If-None-Match / If-Modified-Since. Configure it to return 304 when the validator matches, so crawlers avoid re-downloading unchanged pages.

  • Homepage is on the large side (1.3 MB decompressed)

    Consider trimming inlined payloads to reduce crawl cost.

HTTP Headers

  • All 7 security headers present

  • Link header present but does not reference AI discovery files

    Add AI discovery entries to your Link header: Link: </llms.txt>; rel="alternate"; type="text/plain", </.well-known/agent.json>; rel="alternate"; type="application/json"

RSL LicenseInformational

  • RSL license discovered via robots.txt License directive (1 reference(s))

  • RSL license document Content-Type is "application/xml"

    Configure your server to serve RSL license document as application/rsl+xml so AI agents parse it correctly.

  • Root <rsl> element with correct namespace

  • 1 <content> element(s), all with url attribute

  • License terms declared — permits[usage]: ai-train ai-input; prohibits[usage]: all

Security.txt

  • /.well-known/security.txt exists

  • Required field "Contact" present

  • Required field "Expires" present

  • Expires date is in the future (2027-05-31)

  • 2/5 optional fields present

Sitemap

  • Sitemap located: http://www.theguardian.com/sitemaps/news.xml

  • Content-Type is XML (text/xml)

  • 523 URL(s) declared

  • 100% of URLs have <lastmod>

  • Newest <lastmod> is recent (0 day(s) ago)

TLS / HTTPS

  • Site is served over HTTPS

  • HTTP requests redirect to HTTPS

  • HSTS max-age=63072000

  • HSTS includes subdomains

  • HSTS preload-eligible

Agent AccessInformational

  • ClaudeBot blocked at the server — consistent with its robots.txt Disallow

  • Claude-SearchBot blocked at the server — consistent with its robots.txt Disallow

  • PerplexityBot blocked at the server — consistent with its robots.txt Disallow

  • CCBot blocked at the server — consistent with its robots.txt Disallow

SEO Basics

  • <title> length 48 chars: "Latest news, sport and opinion from the Guardian"

  • Meta description length 128 chars

  • Canonical URL: https://www.theguardian.com

  • <html lang="en">

  • UTF-8 charset declared

  • Viewport meta present: "width=device-width,minimum-scale=1,initial-scale=1"