# Hidden Layer

> See what AI sees. Agent-readiness audits and industry benchmarks for the AI era.

Hidden Layer is a free tool that audits any brand's agent-readiness — scoring how AI crawlers,
LLMs, and autonomous agents discover, read, and interact with a site vs what humans see.

## What we do

- **Agent-Readiness Audits**: 46+ checks across 8 categories (Discoverability, Bot Access,
  AI Discovery, Agent Integration, AI Visibility, GEO Presence, Commerce, Product Pages). Letter grade A–F + normalized 100-point score.
- **Human / Agent Toggle**: Visualise the render gap — what humans see vs what AI crawlers receive.
  Per-bot visibility matrix for 12 canonical AI bots.
- **Live Leaderboard**: Real audit results, public — submit any domain to add it.
- **Industry Benchmarks**: Median scores by vertical.
- **Scoring Methodology**: Transparent, open scoring framework. See /methodology for full spec.

## Key pages

- /audit/new — Audit any brand (free, no login)
- /leaderboard — Brands by agent-readiness score
- /benchmarks — Industry median scores
- /research — Signal adoption rates and score distributions across all audited domains
- /methodology — How scoring works (8 categories, grade scale, full check list)
- /blog — GEO and agent-readiness research

## Blog articles

- /post/cold-recall — Cold recall: the 15-point GEO check that tells you if AI knows your brand
- /post/product-schema-ai-commerce — Product schema in the AI era: why your store's JSON-LD is now table stakes
- /post/geo-leaderboard-2026 — The GEO leaderboard: who's winning AI visibility in 2026
- /post/render-gap — The render gap: why your website is invisible to AI
- /post/robots-ai-bots — robots.txt in the AI era: what major brands got wrong
- /post/llms-txt-guide — llms.txt: a year in, what actually works
- /post/scoring-methodology — 46+ checks, one grade: how we score AI readiness
- /post/ai-bot-registry — The 12 AI bots crawling your site right now

## This site's agent-readiness

We dogfood our own recommendations. This site:
- Allows ClaudeBot, GPTBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended
- Blocks CCBot, Bytespider (no training without consent)
- Provides this llms.txt with CORS headers
- Exposes /.well-known/mcp.json (MCP server card)
- Has sitemap.xml at /sitemap.xml
- Publishes RSS feed at /feed.xml (all blog posts, auto-generated at build)
- Enforces HTTPS

## Contact

Built independently. Not an official Akeneo product.
Live at: https://hidden-layer-blogs.pages.dev