---
title: "Readiness levels and scoring | Agent-Ready Check"
description: "How the scanner turns 22 individual checks into a level from 0 to 5, and how partial scans are scored."
locale: en
canonical: https://agent-ready.t0ols.com/methodology/
---

# Readiness levels and scoring

A level is a cumulative statement about what an agent can already do with your site. Rungs are evaluated in order and a site sits at the highest rung it fully satisfies.

## The five levels

### Level 0: Not Ready

No crawl policy or discovery basics are in place yet.

### Level 1: Basic Web Presence

Pass two of three: robots.txt, a sitemap, or Link headers.

### Level 2: Bot-Aware

Level 1 plus explicit AI bot rules and Content Signals in robots.txt.

### Level 3: Agent-Readable

Level 2 plus markdown content negotiation, so agents read clean content.

### Level 4: Agent-Integrated

Level 3 plus at least one discoverable integration: an MCP Server Card, A2A Agent Card, Agent Skills index or API Catalog.

### Level 5: Agent-Native

Level 4 plus two of three: verifiable bot identity (Web Bot Auth), integrations in place, and auth metadata (OAuth or auth.md).

## Partial scans

You can choose which checks to run. A check that was not run never blocks a level, because it is skipped rather than failed, so a focused seven-check scan of a well-built content site reports a high level. The result card always labels a partial scan with the exact count, so a high number is never mistaken for a full pass.

## Scoring

The 0-100 score is the share of applicable checks that were satisfied. Checks excluded by configuration, or not applicable to this kind of site, are removed from both the numerator and the denominator; a warning counts as half credit.

## How the level criteria were derived

The ladder and the pass criteria were reverse-engineered from observed behaviour of the reference scanner across a sample of sites, then pinned down with regression tests. Where a criterion was ambiguous, the interpretation that reproduces the reference result was chosen and is documented in the tests.

## Excluded checks

Web Bot Auth is informational: publishing a key directory claims that you sign your outbound requests, so a site that does not sign should not publish one. The five commerce checks are scored only on sites with e-commerce signals.