By Iliass El Barhoumi · Published · Last updated
How is indexable & accessible scored?
Indexable & accessible is worth 6 of 100 points, 6 of the 25 in the Retrieved lever, which asks “Can an engine fetch this page at all?” The engine scores it with these rules:
- A noindex in a meta robots tag or X-Robots-Tag header is flagged critical and shown above the score.
- 2 points for a canonical tag that points at the page itself.
- 4 points for content readable without a wall: imperative phrases such as “subscribe to continue” in the last 35% of the text count as a wall.
- On pages under 400 words, a wall phrase anywhere counts, because a hard wall that cut everything is the likeliest explanation.
What does a pass and a fail look like?
| Verdict | Example |
|---|---|
| Pass | A 200 response, a self-referencing canonical, no noindex, and the full article in the HTML for any visitor. |
| Fail | A blog post that inherited noindex from a staging setting, or one whose canonical points at the category page. Neither can be cited however good it is. |
How do you fix indexable & accessible?
In the order worth doing it:
- Remove any noindex from pages you want cited, including ones set by an SEO plugin’s defaults.
- Point each canonical at the page itself unless it really is a duplicate.
- If content is gated, keep the answer to the page’s main question above the gate.
A scan reports the evidence behind the verdict, such as the sections, paragraphs or tokens that failed, and the fix prompt hands the same evidence to a coding agent so it can make the change for you.
Related checks in the Retrieved lever
- Is your robots.txt blocking AI crawlers? — 8 points
- Do AI crawlers run JavaScript? — 7 points
- Does llms.txt actually do anything? — 4 points
Frequently asked questions
Can AI engines cite a page with a noindex tag?
Search-based answer engines respect noindex the way search engines do, so a noindexed page is out of their index. That is why CrawlRadar flags noindex as critical rather than as a few lost points.
Does a paywall stop AI citations?
An engine can only quote what it can read. If the answer sits behind the wall, the page can be indexed but has nothing quotable, so put the key answer above any gate.