Crane Index™
find, use and trust you?
The Crane Index is a single, honest score of how ready your business is for AI-driven discovery, drawn live from your real site across three reads: whether AI can retrieve and cite you, whether an agent can act on you, and whether it describes you correctly.
See your Crane IndexA score, not a self-assessment.
Most readiness checks ask you to rate yourself, then hand back the answers you gave them. The Crane Index does the opposite. It reads your live site the way a machine does and returns a single score for how ready you are to be found, used and trusted by AI. Nothing is installed, nothing is guessed, and every point traces back to a specific cause you can fix. It is the difference between an opinion and a measurement.
Three questions every machine asks.
AI visibility is not one thing. Before a model recommends you, acts for a user on your site, or describes you in an answer, it has to be able to do three separate things: retrieve and cite you, act on you, and represent you correctly. A business can pass one and quietly fail the others. The Crane Index scores each read on its own terms, so you see not just whether you are ready, but which of the three is holding you back.
Retrieval, agent execution and brand representation, each scored out of 100 and drawn live from your real pages. Run the three reads →
How the score is built.
The Index is the picture across three independent scanners, each grounded in what a machine can actually do with your site, then benchmarked and turned into a mark you can prove.
Can it retrieve you
The AI Search read checks whether a model can find, read and cite your business, the structured data, the content it can extract, the trust signals it needs to quote you with confidence.
Can an agent act on you
The Agent read checks whether an automated agent, working on a person's behalf, can actually complete a task on your site rather than stalling on something a human would click through.
Does it describe you correctly
The Brand Representation read checks how AI describes your business back to a user, whether the facts, positioning and specifics survive the round trip or get quietly reinvented.
Drawn live, not declared
Every score is computed from your live pages at the moment you run it, so it cannot be gamed by a questionnaire. The only way to move it is to genuinely fix what a machine cannot read or do.
Benchmarked, not abstract
Each result is placed against the live distribution for that read, so you see where you sit against the field rather than a number in isolation.
A mark you can prove
A strong Index earns an embeddable mark, Certified for a single read, Verified across all three, and Crane Elite at the top. Each is drawn from your real scores, so it cannot be faked and it links back to your result.
A fix list, not a verdict
Every deduction is tied to a specific, named cause, so the score doubles as an ordered list of what to fix first for the biggest gain.
Re-runnable any time
Run it again after the work and watch each read move, so progress is measured against the same standard rather than a shifting story.
Run it, fix it, watch it move.
The Crane Index is free to run and takes a minute. It returns a score for each read, your position against the field, and the fixes that move each one. Do the work, run it again, and the number tells you plainly whether it landed. The score is the start of the work, not the end of it.
Three reads, scored live, benchmarked, and turned into a mark you can embed. See the AI Visibility Suite →
How the Index works.
Is the Crane Index just a vanity score?
No. It is drawn live from your real site, not a questionnaire, across three independent reads, and it is reproducible: run it again and you get the same result until the site changes. Every point traces back to a specific, fixable cause, so the score is a to-do list, not a trophy.
What does it actually measure?
The three questions a machine asks about your business: whether it can retrieve and cite you, whether an agent can act on you, and whether it describes you correctly. Retrieval, agent execution and brand representation, each scored out of 100.
Can the score be gamed?
The score is computed from your live pages, so the only way to move it is to genuinely fix what a machine cannot read or act on. The marks you can earn, Certified, Verified and Crane Elite, are drawn from those real scores, so they cannot be faked and they link back to your result.
How do I get my Crane Index?
Run the free scanners. Each returns a score, where you sit against the field, and the specific fixes that move it. A strong result earns an embeddable mark that proves it. It takes a minute and needs nothing installed.
See your Crane Index.
Run the three reads on your own site and see where you stand: whether a machine can retrieve you, act on you, and describe you correctly, with the fixes that move each score. It is free, it takes a minute, and it needs nothing installed.
See your Crane IndexThe senior read,
once a week.
Most marketing newsletters are noise on a schedule. This is not that. Once a week I send a short, considered read on the shifts that actually change what you should do, in paid media, AI search and technical SEO. Filtered, weighted and personally signed off by me.
Nic CraneFounder, The Crane Consultancy