GEO Readiness Badge Generator
Embeds a badge carrying the score from a real scan. The number is read from the scan and cannot be edited, so the badge means something to whoever sees it.
What the badge is
It is a shields.io image, generated from a scan of your homepage, that carries your score out of 100 and links back to the report it came from. Two formats are offered: Markdown for a GitHub README, and HTML for a site footer.
The colour is not decorative. It is chosen from the score: green at 80 and above, amber from 60 to 79, red below 60. A reader can tell roughly where you stand without clicking anything.
Why the number cannot be typed in
It is worth being explicit, because most badge generators let you set your own score.
A badge whose number the bearer chooses is not evidence of anything. — the design note this page was built from
So the field is read-only. If the scan fails, or if your homepage answers with a block page or an error document rather than the page itself, no embed code is produced at all. Saying nothing is better than handing somebody a number they cannot defend when asked where it came from.
The same rule applies to the badge as to a score: it is a claim about whether your pages are in a state that makes being cited possible. It is not a claim that any engine currently cites you.
How do I embed it?
Four steps, and the third one is the one people skip.
- Enter your domain and check the score. Nothing is generated until a scan succeeds.
- Pick a preview style. All three embed the same flat shields.io image.
- Copy the snippet and paste it, then click the badge once to confirm it resolves. A badge that 404s is worse than no badge.
- Re-scan and replace the snippet whenever your site changes, because the number is baked into the image at copy time and will not move by itself.
What does the badge actually prove?
It proves that on the date of the scan, the homepage satisfied a specific, published set of checks. Nothing more. The scanner runs 40 checks across 12 weighted dimensions, and every rule and its point value is on the methodology page.
| The badge shows | The badge does not show |
|---|---|
| Whether crawlers can reach the page, from robots.txt and the response | Whether any AI engine currently mentions, recommends or cites you |
| Whether the markup gives a model something extractable: entity data, structure, evidence | Whether a citation is likely. Readiness is a precondition, not a prediction |
| The homepage only, on the date stamped in the report | Anything about your interior pages, which a one-URL scan never reads |
The dimension carrying the most weight is crawler access at 16%, because a page that cannot be read has no path to being quoted at all. The dimensions carrying the least are delivery and international readiness, and the reasoning for every weight is published rather than asserted.
Questions about embedding the badge
Does the badge update automatically?
No. The score is baked into the image URL when you copy the snippet, so it stays at that number until you replace the snippet.
Can I set the score myself?
No, deliberately. The score field is read-only and is filled only from a successful scan.
What happens if my site blocks the scan?
No embed code is generated. There is no honest score to display, so the page says so rather than showing a number.
Should I remove the badge if my score drops?
That is your call, but a badge that disagrees with the report it links to is worse than no badge.
What the badge will not do for you
The badge is a small artefact, and it is fair to say what it is not, because the evidence for what actually moves visibility points elsewhere.
Adding source citations produced the largest measured visibility gain for low-ranking sites, at +115%, ahead of the addition of expert quotations at +41% and statistics at +30-40%, across the strategies tested on generative engines. — Generative Engine Optimization, KDD 2024
A score of 91 and a badge in your README is a statement about your markup. It is not a citation, and no badge generator can produce one for you. What the badge is genuinely good for is the same thing a public score is good for anywhere: it makes the state of the page visible, and visible problems get fixed.
The scanner is open source, so a disagreement with any of the above can be specific. The code, including the rule set this badge is scored against, is at github.com/Alex13192/geo-scanner.