Webmasters Playbook
Make your public website easy to fetch, identify, understand, and evaluate. GoGuides independently observes the open web and publishes evidence, provenance, and GoGuides-derived assessments. Payment, ownership verification, observation, AI Rank, and outside-platform visibility are separate states.
1. Start with fetchability and stable identity
Return sensible HTTP responses
Avoid redirect loops, persistent server errors, broken canonical targets, and unnecessary challenges on public pages you want crawled.
Use stable canonical URLs
Make it clear which URL represents the primary version of important content.
Keep important meaning in accessible HTML
Critical identity and content should not depend entirely on an image or fragile client-side interaction.
Publish a coherent site structure
Clear titles, headings, internal links, and sitemaps help automated systems discover the intended information architecture.
2. Understand what AI Rank means
AI Rank is a GoGuides-derived 0–100 assessment produced from supported public signals. It is not a universal web score and does not guarantee ranking, traffic, citation, recommendation, or use by another company.
The same normalized URL should resolve through the same authoritative GoGuides record path wherever GoGuides reports its score. Root/domain context and exact-page measurements remain separate scopes.
3. Make important facts inspectable
State plainly who operates the site, what it offers, where it operates, and which policies or qualifications matter. Support important claims with dates, source material, documentation, or other appropriate evidence. Clear factual content is easier to inspect than unsupported superlatives.
4. Treat observation, verification, and inclusion as separate
Observed
GoGuides independently encountered and measured supported public web state.
Ownership verification
Accepted proof-of-control or authorization evidence is represented separately from content assessment.
Live Index inclusion
An eligible domain may use the public submission flow. Payment does not buy a higher AI Rank, better grade, or favorable evaluation.
5. Read the favicon as record-state visualization
The GoGuides favicon system is deterministic record-state visualization. It reflects supported authoritative resolved inputs behind the rendered state. It is not a certificate, endorsement, security seal, or proof that the website is truthful.
6. Use history to understand change
Repeated observations can build longitudinal context that a single crawl cannot provide. History and Change Intelligence can expose supported differences between stored states while preserving explicit insufficient-history and unknown conditions where evidence is not available.
7. Bot Radar reports requests, not downstream outcomes
Bot Radar can report qualifying automated requests observed on supported GoGuides surfaces. Those requests do not, by themselves, prove that an outside system indexed a site, used it in training, retrieved it for an answer, cited it, recommended it, or relied on it.
8. Machine-facing interfaces are available
Evaluate
Scope-specific GoGuides evidence and interpretation.
Web State
Compact stored observation evidence for supported state dimensions.
Change Intelligence
Deterministic comparison of consecutive aligned stored observations.
URL Request
A documented way for a machine client to request intelligence for one public URL.
9. Improve what the evidence actually shows
There is no shortcut that guarantees a higher score or outside AI visibility. Improve the underlying site: useful content, clear purpose, stable technical behavior, accurate identity, accessible policies, sensible structure, and honest claims. Then let new observations reflect those changes.