> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.surfais.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.
# AIS Score vs Readiness Score
> Two different axes: what AI says about you today, and how well you're set up to improve it. Deliberately never merged into one number.
If you have both a live [AIS Score](/metrics/ais-score) and a completed [audit](/audits/what-audits-check), you have two numbers on your brand — and they can disagree. This is the single most common point of confusion in Surfais, so read this page before you try to reconcile them.
These are answers to two different questions. They are **never merged into one number**, and a gap between them isn't a bug in either one.
## Two questions, two scores
**The AIS Score asks: "What do AI platforms say about me today?"**
It's your one North-Star number — computed from your live scan data, the actual answers ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews gave to the prompts you track, right now. It's shown on your dashboard gauge and it's a direct, measured fact: presence, position, sentiment, and share of voice from real AI answers. See [AIS Score](/metrics/ais-score) for the full breakdown.
**The Readiness Score asks: "How well am I set up to earn AI citations?"**
It's produced by your [audit](/audits/what-audits-check) — a separate, deep assessment of your content, site structure, and authority signals, scored across six weighted categories. It's a diagnosis of your groundwork, not a measurement of your current visibility. See [What audits check](/audits/what-audits-check) for how an audit is built.
**Naming matters here.** The measured, live number is always called the "AIS" or "AIS Score." The audit's own composite is always called the "Readiness Score" — never "AIS," "AIS composite," or any variant. If you ever see the audit's number described as an AIS figure, that's a labelling error worth reporting, because it would mean two contradictory "AIS" numbers showing up in the same product.
## The six Readiness categories
The Readiness Score is a weighted sum across six categories, each scored out of its share of 100:
| Category | Weight | What it assesses |
| ------------------------- | ------ | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ |
| Citability | 25% | Self-contained, answer-first content that AI can quote and cite directly |
| Authority & Brand Signals | 24% | Earned editorial coverage, author credentials, entity presence (Wikipedia, Wikidata, etc.) |
| Structural Readability | 18% | Heading hierarchy, semantic HTML, scannable comparative content |
| Technical AI-Readiness | 18% | Crawler access, server-side rendering, schema markup hygiene |
| Branded-share Health | 10% | The mix and trajectory of branded vs non-branded visibility |
| Multi-modal Coverage | 5% | Text, image, and video coverage as additional citation surfaces |
Citability and Authority & Brand Signals carry the most weight because earned, citable content is the dominant channel AI platforms actually draw from — see [What audits check](/audits/what-audits-check) for how each category is scored and what drives it up or down.
## When they diverge
Divergence is normal, and each direction tells you something different:
**High AIS Score, low Readiness Score — visible, but fragile.** You're being mentioned often and well right now, but the audit finds thin groundwork underneath it: weak citability, gaps in technical AI-readiness, or authority signals that haven't been earned yet. This pattern is a warning, not a contradiction — your current visibility may be riding on factors that don't hold up as AI platforms change how they source answers. The fix is to close the Readiness gap before the AIS Score catches up to it on its own (usually downward).
**Low AIS Score, high Readiness Score — groundwork laid, visibility lags.** Your content, structure, and authority signals are in good shape by the audit's assessment, but it hasn't translated into AI platforms actually mentioning you yet. This is the more encouraging divergence: the audit says the foundation is sound, and visibility is a matter of time, more tracked prompts, or waiting for AI platforms' source mix to catch up with content that's already citable. Check [Why scores move](/metrics/why-scores-move) for how new tracking scope affects the AIS Score independently of underlying readiness.
**Both scores roughly aligned** is the expected steady state — your measured visibility and your structural readiness broadly agree, whether that's both strong, both weak, or both middling.
## Which one to act on
Use the **AIS Score** to know where you stand right now and to track whether changes are working — it's your outcome metric, and the number your [monthly reports](/reports/monthly-reports) track over time.
Use the **Readiness Score** and its category breakdown to know *what to fix*. The audit's [30-day playbook](/audits/reading-your-audit) translates low-scoring categories into specific, prioritised actions, and it explicitly forecasts an expected AIS delta for following through — because the Readiness Score is the diagnosis, and the AIS Score is the outcome the diagnosis is aiming to move.
Run an audit periodically (see [Running your first audit](/audits/running-your-first-audit)) and keep watching your AIS Score between audits. Neither number replaces the other.
## Related metrics
The full breakdown of the measured, live visibility number.
How the Readiness Score and its six categories are built.
How to turn a low Readiness category into a prioritised action.
Bands, the credibility ramp, and common causes of AIS movement.