AI Readiness Check scores explained: what the four numbers mean

The free AI Readiness Check at sw.marketing runs Google Lighthouse on your site through PageSpeed Insights, using a mobile profile, and returns four scores from 0 to 100: Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices, and SEO. Performance measures how fast the page loads and responds on a phone, Accessibility measures whether everyone can use it, Best Practices measures security and modern coding standards, and SEO measures whether search engines can read and understand the page. Fix the cheap, high-impact problems first: oversized images, unused plugins and scripts, missing alt text and labels, and missing titles and descriptions.

What the AI Readiness Check measures

When you enter a URL at the free AI Readiness Check, we ask Google's PageSpeed Insights API to load your page with Lighthouse, Google's open-source auditing tool. Lighthouse loads the page the way a mid-range phone on a slower mobile connection would, runs dozens of automated checks, and groups the results into the four categories. You can read how the tool works in Google's Lighthouse documentation.

Each score is a number from 0 to 100. Google colors them in three bands: 0 to 49 is red (poor), 50 to 89 is orange (needs improvement), and 90 to 100 is green (good). The Performance score is a weighted blend of timing metrics such as Largest Contentful Paint and Total Blocking Time, while the other three are built from pass-or-fail checks.

We use the mobile profile on purpose. Most local searches in Las Vegas happen on a phone, whether that is a visitor on hotel Wi-Fi near the Strip or a Henderson homeowner searching for AC repair at 11 p.m. A site that looks fine on an office desktop can still score in the red on mobile, and mobile is the version Google evaluates first.

The four scores in plain language

Performance

Performance answers one question: how quickly can a customer see and use your page on a phone. It tracks how long the largest image or headline takes to appear, how long the page is frozen while scripts load, and whether elements jump around while loading. Of the four scores, this is the one local business sites most often fail, and it is the one customers feel directly.

Accessibility

Accessibility checks whether people who use screen readers, keyboard navigation, or larger text can still use the site. Lighthouse looks for image alt text, form labels, color contrast, readable font sizes, and a declared page language.

Best Practices

Best Practices covers security and code health. It checks that the whole page loads over HTTPS with no mixed content, that images display at their correct size and proportions, that the browser console is free of errors, and that the site does not depend on deprecated browser features. A low score here usually points to an aging theme or a plugin that has not been updated.

SEO

The SEO score checks the basics search engines need: a title tag, a meta description, crawlable links, a viewport tag for mobile, no accidental "noindex" rule, valid hreflang tags if you publish in more than one language, and descriptive link text. It does not measure rankings or content quality, only whether the technical obstacles to being found are gone.

Why Google's own scoring matters

These are Google's measurements, built on the same metrics Google uses in its page experience guidance. Google states that Core Web Vitals are part of how it evaluates page experience in Search, so a slow mobile page competes at a disadvantage against a fast one with similar content.

Customers matter more than rankings. A shopper comparing inventory along Sahara Avenue or at the Valley Automall in Henderson, a tourist looking for a late-night taco spot: each of them will leave a page that takes too long to respond. Speed, clear labels, and working forms are the difference between a visit and a phone call.

AI search adds a third audience. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews, and similar tools send crawlers that read the HTML of your page, not the visual design. Pages with clean titles, proper headings, descriptive alt text, labeled forms, and a declared language are easier for these systems to parse and quote. The same fixes that raise your Accessibility and SEO scores make your business easier for an AI assistant to describe correctly.

For bilingual businesses this counts twice. If your Spanish pages share the same template as your English pages, a missing lang attribute or a broken hreflang tag means Google and AI tools may not know which version to show a Spanish-speaking customer in North Las Vegas. The check flags both problems.

Common causes of low scores

The same handful of problems explains most red and orange scores:

• Oversized images. A 4,000-pixel photo from a phone camera uploaded straight to the homepage banner. Often the single biggest cause of a low Performance score.
• Heavy page builders and plugin stacks. Drag-and-drop builders and a dozen plugins each load their own scripts and stylesheets, much of it unused.
• Render-blocking scripts. Chat widgets, tracking tags, font loaders, and sliders that must finish loading before anything appears.
• Missing alt text and form labels. Photos with no description and contact forms with placeholder text instead of real labels.
• Insecure or mixed content. A site on HTTPS that still loads an image or script over plain HTTP, or a missing redirect from the HTTP version.
• Missing titles and meta descriptions. Pages titled "Home" or with no description, which hurts both search listings and AI summaries.
• Poor mobile tap targets and tiny text. Links and buttons too small or too close together to tap on a phone, and fonts that require pinching to read.

What to fix first

Work in order of impact per dollar. Most of the list below takes hours, not a rebuild.

1. Compress and resize images. Export images at the size they display, convert them to WebP or AVIF, and turn on lazy loading for anything below the fold. This alone can move Performance out of the red.
2. Add titles, meta descriptions, alt text, and form labels. These are text edits. They lift SEO and Accessibility quickly and help AI tools read the page.
3. Fix HTTPS and mixed content. Force the secure version of every URL and update any hard-coded http:// links in your theme or content.
4. Remove or defer scripts you do not need. Audit your plugins, retire the unused ones, and load chat and tracking tags after the page content.
5. Fix contrast, font size, and tap targets. Small CSS changes that mostly affect Accessibility and mobile usability.
6. Then decide whether the platform itself is the problem. If you have done all of the above and Performance is still orange, the theme or builder is the bottleneck. At that point a lighter rebuild is often cheaper than more patching, which is why our website service targets 95 or higher on all four scores and is priced as a monthly partnership rather than a large upfront build.

A note on lab scores and real users

Lighthouse is a lab measurement: one simulated load, on one simulated device, at one moment. Google's Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) measures what real visitors experience over a 28-day window, and the two can disagree. Google explains the reasons in its guide to lab and field data differences. Treat the four scores as a reliable diagnosis of what to fix, and treat real-user data as the final grade.

Where to start

Run your homepage and your busiest landing page through the free AI Readiness Check and note which of the four scores is lowest. Then work down the priority list above. For a second opinion on what the results mean for your business, contact us.