Readiness check
Run a check on a single page or draft, read its severity-ranked recommendations, and see the exact fix for each one.
Overview#
Smart Audit sweeps your whole site. Readiness Check goes deep on one piece of content and tells you exactly what to change before it goes out.
The difference in use is straightforward. Smart Audit is periodic housekeeping across everything you have already published. Readiness Check is what you run on a specific page, usually one that matters or one you are about to publish.
Running a check#
Choose what to check by Content type, which covers published content such as a Blog article, and Draft content you have not shipped yet.
Draft content is the higher-value use. Fixing a piece before publication costs minutes. Fixing it afterwards means republishing, waiting for re-crawl, and waiting again for engines to pick up the change, which spans several analysis cycles.
While it runs you see Running readiness check. On a new project, No readiness reports yet. Run your first check above is the empty state, not an error.
Interpreting results#
Recommendations are ranked by Severity, running from Critical through Medium, and working top-down is genuinely the right order rather than a suggestion. Filters let you narrow by Any severity or by content type, which starts to matter once you have run several checks and the history is no longer short.
Selecting a recommendation opens its detail, with Select a recommendation to see the fix as the prompt before you have picked one. Each gives you the Current state describing what the page has today, the recommended change with what to replace it with, and Source for where on the page the problem sits.
No current value detected on the page means the element is missing entirely rather than being wrong, and that is usually the quicker of the two to fix, since there is nothing to preserve.
Recommendation
Meta description
- Severity
- Critical
- Current state
- No current value detected on the page
- Source
- <head>
The checks cover the things that decide whether an engine can parse your content and attribute it confidently: Meta description, Author, Publish date and other Optional metadata, alongside the Content structure itself.
Authorship and dates matter considerably more than most people expect them to. An engine deciding whether to trust a page weighs whether it can tell who wrote the thing and when, and a page answering neither question is easier to pass over in favour of one that does.
Reports and history#
Recent reports and All reports keep your history, so a previous check can be reopened rather than run again from scratch.
A recommendation can be marked Ignored where it genuinely does not apply, and Active ones remain outstanding. Using this properly is worth the effort compared with filtering the list in your head, because an ignored item stops cluttering the view and the remaining list stays a real to-do rather than something everybody has quietly learned to skim past.
Best practices#
- Run on drafts rather than only on published pages.
- Critical items cleared before you publish anything that matters.
- A real ignore list instead of a long list of items the team has learned to skip.
- Metadata complete, particularly author and date.
- One clear question answered per page. No amount of metadata rescues a page that hedges.
Next steps#
- Check your draft before publishing, which is the cheapest point in the entire cycle to fix anything at all.
- Work Critical first, then Medium.
- Read Current state before applying a fix, so you know what you are replacing and why it was there.
- Ignore what genuinely does not apply, so the list keeps meaning something.
- Re-run after editing to confirm the change actually registered.
- Use Smart Audit for the site-wide view. If the same recommendation turns up on every page you check, it is a template problem and belongs there instead of being fixed twenty times.
Limitations#
Readiness Check assesses one piece of content. It says nothing about whether AI crawlers can reach your site at all, which is a site-level question covered by Smart Audit.
It checks whether a page is structured to be read and cited. It cannot tell you whether that page answers a question buyers are actually asking, which is what Gap analysis is for.
Passing every check makes a page citable. It does not make it cited.