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 →
A published benchmark, not an opinion.
The Index is a standard because we hold it to ourselves in public. In July 2026 we scanned 221 of Britain's biggest brands, the full FTSE 100 and the 100 largest UK online retailers, and published every figure. Nearly half could not be read by a machine at all, and the readable rest share one blind spot.
Read the two cohorts and the cross-market picture in full. Crane Index™ Research →
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.
Can I compare against competitors, or across my own pages?
Both. Run any URL, then compare it against a competitor on the same rubric to see exactly where you stand, or line it up across your own key pages to find which template or section is holding you back. On the tracked Index we keep your whole competitive set scored alongside you every night.
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.
Three instruments, one standard.
Crane Index™ is one of three built in-house, each to the same exacting standard. Crane Engine™ governs how budget is paced, and where the next pound is best spent. Crane Intelligence™ pulls paid, organic, AI search and CRM into one honest view. They are built to work together.
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 shift, on the record
The move to AI answers is documented, not a hunch. In 2026, Google reported that its AI Mode in Search had passed a billion monthly users. What those users can be shown of you comes down to the machine-readable layer of your site, the structured data Google Search Central documents. The question is no longer whether a buyer asks an AI about your market, but whether it can read you, and represent you accurately, when they do.
The 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, across the AI shift, PPC, technical SEO and analytics. Filtered, weighted and signed off by me before it goes out. The judgement is mine, and now you can hear every edition in my own voice.
Nic CraneFounder, The Crane Consultancy
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