The board brief

Every full run ends with a board brief: one page per domain, written for a reader who will never open the workspace — a board member, a CEO, a head of department deciding whether to fund the work. The Board page in the workspace collects the latest brief for every domain; Printable report turns them into a document with a portfolio summary on the first page.

The five figures

Each domain is described by the same five numbers, so domains — and months — compare directly.

Figure	What it means
Readable by AI assistants	The share of pages that ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google’s AI could read when they asked for them. Below 50% means the site is mostly closed to them, usually without anyone having decided that.
Readers’ questions fully answered	Of the questions people ask in this site’s field, the share the site’s own pages answer completely. A partial answer is one an assistant will complete from somewhere else.
Buying questions fully answered	The same, for questions with purchase intent — prices, comparisons, “which should I choose”. These are the questions where being the cited source is worth most.
Factual statements carry a source	The share of claims on the site that come with a figure, a citation, a quote or first-party data. Assistants prefer to quote statements they can attribute.
Critical issues	Problems confirmed after review that block the rest from mattering — typically access.

Where there is a previous run, the direction since then is shown next to the figure.

The words

The figures are computed; the words are written from them and checked against them — the brief may not introduce numbers of its own. It has four parts:

• Where we stand — the position, in plain language.
• What is at risk — at most three risks, each with what is happening and what it costs the organisation.
• Decisions for the leadership team — at most three, each a choice with an owner, a reason, the cost of doing nothing and when to expect a result. Decisions, not tasks: “decide whether AI assistants may read and quote our journalism” is a decision; “update robots.txt” is a task for the technical report.
• What changed — since the previous measurement.

Any technical term the brief could not avoid is explained in a short glossary at the end. Each finding in the technical report also carries a one-sentence plain-language version, so a non-technical reader can open any of them.

What it does not claim

The brief measures how much of the site machines can reach, understand and cite — capacity, not traffic. Until Search Console and analytics are connected, it does not say how many visits were gained or lost, and it says so on the page. Google’s own crawler is deliberately absent from the figures: the test requests that identify as Googlebot come from Vercatus’s network, so a refusal there is the site behaving correctly.