How Quence works
Quence reads your website the way a search engine or an AI assistant does, then tells you, in plain English, what is helping you get found and what is holding you back. Here is exactly what it checks and why each thing matters.
When you enter your address, Quence fetches your homepage over the public internet, exactly like Google’s crawler would. It reads the raw HTML, your robots.txt file, your sitemap, and a few key pages from that sitemap. It does not log in, it does not run scripts on your server, and it only ever looks at pages that are already public. From that, it produces a score out of 100 and a list of specific, fixable issues.
The checks fall into three groups. Together they answer one question: when someone searches for what you do, can Google and the new AI search tools find you, understand you, and put you in front of them?
1. Findability, the basics Google needs
These are the signals search engines have used for years. Get them wrong and you are invisible before you even start competing on content.
- Title tag. The clickable headline in Google results. It should be unique, around 50 to 60 characters, and lead with what you actually do. A missing or generic title is one of the most common reasons small business pages underperform.
- Meta description. The grey summary under your title in search results. It does not directly change rankings, but a clear one earns more clicks, and clicks matter.
- One clear H1 heading. Your main on-page headline. Search engines use it to understand what the page is about. Pages with no H1, or five of them, confuse that signal.
- Canonical tag and indexability.We check that the page is not accidentally set to “noindex” and that it tells Google which version of the URL is the real one. A single stray noindex tag can quietly wipe a page off Google entirely.
The most damaging issue we find is usually silent: a page set to noindex by mistake, or a robots.txt that blocks the whole site. Nothing on the page is wrong, but Google will not show it. Quence flags this as critical because it is.
2. AI-readiness, the new way people find you
More and more people ask ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity or Google’s AI overview instead of scrolling a results page. Whether those tools can recommend your business comes down to a few concrete, checkable things, which most audit tools ignore.
- AI-crawler access. We read your
robots.txtand report, bot by bot, whether GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and CCBot are allowed in. If one is blocked, that AI literally cannot read or cite you, and no amount of on-page work changes that. - Structured data. Machine-readable tags (schema.org / JSON-LD) that tell AI and search engines who you are, what you sell, and where you are. They make your business far easier to quote accurately.
- Content in the raw HTML. AI crawlers usually do not run JavaScript. If your text only appears after scripts load, they may see a near-empty page. We check how much real text is there before any JavaScript runs.
For the detail on this, see our guide to AI readiness.
3. Technical health and trust
These affect both how you rank and whether visitors trust you the moment they land.
- HTTPS. A secure padlock is a baseline trust and ranking signal. Browsers now warn people away from sites without it.
- Mobile-friendliness. Most local searches happen on phones, and Google indexes the mobile version of your site first. We check for a proper mobile viewport.
- Sitemap and robots.txt. A sitemap helps search engines discover all your pages. A sensible robots.txt keeps them crawling the right things.
- Optional speed check.If you turn it on, we run Google’s PageSpeed test for real Core Web Vitals, the loading and stability scores Google uses in ranking.
Why every finding shows its evidence
Quence is deliberately rule-based, not AI-generated. It never invents a problem. Every finding can be expanded to show the exact line from your page or your robots.txt that triggered it, so you (or your developer) can verify it in seconds. That is the difference between a report you can act on and a vague score you have to take on faith.
What to do with your score
A score in the 80s or 90s means your foundations are solid and you can focus on content and getting found. A score in the 50s or 60s usually means a handful of quick fixes will make a real difference. Below that, there are likely one or two critical issues costing you visibility right now. Every issue in your report comes with a specific fix, so you can work through them yourself, or ask us to.
Ready to see yours? Run a free audit now, or read the full website audit checklist to check your site by hand.