- Focus area
- Crawler-purpose policy · Citation quality · FAQ recalibration
- What changed
- The ecosystem shift since May is toward crawler-purpose differentiation (Search vs Agent vs Training) and claim-level citation quality. Weights raised for robots-based AI-crawler policy and for citation-quality checks. AGENTS.md upweighted to reflect its role as the site's public AI-representation surface. Markdown-mirror upweighted following llms.txt v2's explicit discovery mechanism. FAQ schema downweighted after Google removed the FAQ rich-result feature — the schema is still valid; it no longer earns the Google presentation it used to.
- Score impact
- Most audits will shift by 3 to 5 points in either direction. Sites with clean crawler policies and a published AGENTS.md will gain. Sites that relied heavily on FAQ schema for perceived Google presence will lose a small amount.
- What to do
- Re-audit if your prior score sat on a band boundary (60, 70, 85), or if AGENTS.md was central to your prior score.