Frequently Asked Questions
Everything you need to know about AI Readiness, the ACRS standard, and how ads4ai.io works.
AI Readiness is a measure of how well your website communicates with AI systems — search engines, large language models like ChatGPT, and AI agents that book appointments or request quotes on behalf of customers. A business that is AI-ready has structured data, machine-readable content, and open commerce endpoints that let AI systems find it, understand it, and transact with it. As more customers use AI assistants to discover and engage with local services, AI Readiness determines whether your business is visible and accessible to those systems — or invisible to them.
The ACRS (Agentic Commerce Readiness Standard) v1.0 is an open certification standard published by ads4ai.io. It defines 29 programmatic checks across three tiers — AI Discoverable (35 points), AI Readable (40 points), and Agentic Commerce Ready (25 points) — totalling 100 points. Every check maps to a published specification such as Schema.org, RFC 9309, WCAG 2.2, or the llms.txt convention. The standard is freely available at ads4ai.io/standard and can be adopted by any platform or auditor.
Enter your website domain in the scan form on the homepage. Our Playwright-based crawler visits your site, fetches your robots.txt, sitemap.xml, llms.txt and ai.txt files, and runs all 29 ACRS checks — covering schema markup, page performance, mobile responsiveness, structured data quality, trust signals, and agentic commerce endpoints. The full audit takes under 60 seconds and produces a score out of 100, a grade from A to F, and a breakdown of every check with specific fix instructions.
Tier 1 (AI Discoverable) certifies that AI crawlers can find and index your site — HTTPS, LocalBusiness schema, robots.txt, sitemap, and performance basics. Tier 2 (AI Readable) certifies that AI models can accurately describe your business — llms.txt, ai.txt, FAQ schema, pricing signals, availability and trust signals. Tier 3 (Agentic Commerce Ready) certifies that AI agents can transact with your business — contact actions, a machine-readable booking endpoint, a full service catalogue, and an agent commerce policy in your ai.txt file. Each tier requires the previous one to be certified first.
Certification validity varies by tier. Tier 1 is valid for 12 months, Tier 2 for 6 months, and Tier 3 for 3 months. Certifications auto-renew on each scheduled rescan if your site still passes all the required checks. You will receive an email reminder 30 days before any certification expires.
If a scheduled rescan shows your site no longer passes the checks required for a tier, that certification lapses. You have a 30-day remediation window — your public listing still shows the previous certification during this period. After 30 days, if the checks are still failing, the certification is marked as lapsed. Your embeddable badge will automatically display a 'Certification Lapsed' state.
ads4ai.io was founded by Paul Masterson (futureproofwebsite.com), an AI Readiness consultant who implements structured data, llms.txt, ai.txt, and agentic commerce markup that gets businesses to Tier 3. He created the AI Readiness Index that the ACRS standard is built on. Additional verified specialists can register on the platform and are matched to businesses by their specific failing ACRS checks.
A traditional SEO audit focuses on ranking signals — keywords, backlinks, page speed, and meta tags. ads4ai.io audits for AI commerce readiness — structured data formats, machine-readable policy files, and agentic commerce endpoints that AI agents use to find, understand, and transact with your business. The ACRS includes checks with no SEO relevance but critical for AI commerce: llms.txt, ai.txt Transact directives, booking endpoint schema, and agent response SLA declarations.
The initial domain scan is completely free and requires no account. You receive a score, grade, and top issues within 60 seconds. To claim your listing, access fix recommendations for all 29 checks, and earn a certification badge, you need a free account. Paid plans unlock more frequent rescans, the full issues list, priority consultant matching, and featured placement in the directory.
An llms.txt file is placed at the root of your website (yoursite.com/llms.txt) and describes your business in a format optimised for large language models — who you are, what you offer, contact details, and opening hours. It is assessed as ACRS check T2.1 and worth 8 points. It is an emerging convention already used by ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude to answer business queries directly from the file rather than crawling your full site.