independent.ie 28 F
🛡️ SEO 26 🤖 GEO 49 ⚡ Perf 11 🏗️ Arch 75

independent.ie — Global SEODiff Score 28/100

independent.ie
📊

independent.ie registers just 15/100 on the ACRI scale — a bottom-tier result indicating systemic AI visibility problems. Compared to other finance sites (avg score: 57), independent.ie is trailing the benchmark, indicating room for competitive improvement. A ghost ratio of 30% indicates a mixed rendering strategy where core content loads server-side but interactive sections rely on JavaScript. A 50.0× token bloat ratio means crawlers must process significantly more tokens to reach the actual content — a drag on extraction efficiency. Only 1 schema block is present — adding Organization, WebSite, and Breadcrumb schemas would significantly improve structured data coverage. Complete AI crawler restriction cuts this domain off from the growing AI search ecosystem entirely.

28
F — Global SEODiff Score
Comprehensive search visibility assessment
Critical gaps across the board. Start with Performance (11).
🎯 Top Fix: Allow GPTBot + ClaudeBot in robots.txt → lift the score cap
🔬 Automated SEODiff Assessment · Snapshot: Feb 26, 2026 · 📋 API
Does your site score higher than independent.ie?
Run the same 40-signal audit on your own domain — free, instant results.
Scan Your Site Free →
🧮 Score Transparency — How is this calculated?
🛡️ Traditional SEO (25% weight)26 × 0.25 = 6.5
🤖 AI Readiness / GEO (40% weight)49 × 0.40 = 19.6
⚡ Performance (20% weight)11 × 0.20 = 2.2
🏗️ Architecture & Trust (15% weight)75 × 0.15 = 11.2
Weighted sum = 6.5 + 19.6 + 2.2 + 11.2
⚠️ Fatal multiplier: All major AI bots blocked → ×0.5
Global SEODiff Score = 28 (F)
🚫
Gatekeeper Rule: Score cannot exceed 15. Both GPTBot and ClaudeBot are blocked in robots.txt. No major AI assistant can cite this site. Allow at least one major AI crawler to lift the cap. See Bot Access →
📊 ACRI Sub-Scores (AI Readiness Detail)
20
Bot Access
avg 92
84
Rendering
avg 93
66
Structure
avg 35
2
Schema
avg 10
55
Tech Stack
avg 64
🔀
Visibility Delta: Google vs AI
Google (Tranco)
Top 0.4%
Rank #3867
+64 pts
Gap
AI (ACRI)
Top 64%
Score 15/100

independent.ie punches above its weight in AI — AI visibility exceeds Google ranking. This is a competitive moat worth protecting. ACRI measures technical crawler readiness. Read the methodology →

Why independent.ie ranks here

Tech stackExpress
Industryfinance
RenderingHybrid
Schema coverage1 blocks
Token bloat50×+

Fastest improvements

  • Allow GPTBot in robots.txt so AI crawlers can access your pages (see Crawl Access).
  • Allow ClaudeBot (many assistants rely on it) — blocking it often correlates with “AI invisibility.”
  • Reduce token bloat (navigation/footer/code) so agents reach your main content faster (see Token Bloat).
  • Create an llms.txt file so AI crawlers can discover your content structure without heavy crawling. Generate llms.txt →
  • Run a full entropy audit to find which DOM regions waste the most tokens. Run Entropy Audit →
🧪

JavaScript Rendering Check

We check what AI crawlers miss when they skip JavaScript execution.

Running headless browser to simulate AI extraction…
🛡️

Traditional SEO

26/100 25 % of Global Score 🟡 Medium Confidence

📝 Title Tag

17 chars
Too short

Optimal range: 30–60 characters for SERP display.

📋 Meta Description

143 chars
Good length

Optimal range: 120–160 characters for snippet control.

🔤 Heading Hierarchy

  • ✗ Exactly 1 <h1> tag — found 0
  • ✓ Has <h2> headings — found 5
  • ✗ <h2> not before <h1>

🔍 Indexability

  • ✗ Canonical tag present
  • ✓ No noindex directive
  • ✓ Meta viewport set
  • ✓ HTML lang attribute → en
  • ✗ Hreflang tags
  • ✓ Googlebot allowed by robots.txt

🌐 Social / OpenGraph

  • ✓ og:title — Irish Independent
  • ✗ og:description
  • ✓ og:image — preview
  • ✗ twitter:card
📐 How the SEO Pillar score is calculated

SEO Pillar = Title (20 pts) + Meta Desc (20 pts) + Heading Hierarchy (20 pts) + Indexability (20 pts) + Social/OG (20 pts)

Each sub-score is derived from the checks above. Canonical tag, lang attribute, og:image, and a single H1 are the highest-impact items.

🤖

AI Readiness / GEO

49/100 40 % of Global Score 🟢 High Confidence

This pillar aggregates citation share, hallucination risk, bot access, schema health, and content extractability. The individual diagnostic sections below contribute to this score.

🔗

Citation Alternatives

Research
💡
Insight: In the finance sector, unlimit.com (ACRI: 82) currently has stronger AI extractability. AI models tend to prefer sources with higher semantic structure and schema coverage. Domains with ACRI < 40 see 3.5× more hallucinations. Read the research →
independent.ie
43
Your ACRI Score
82
Industry Peer ACRI
AI models prioritize pages with strong semantic structure and schema coverage. unlimit.com has schema coverage of 1 blocks and uses WordPress. Improve your score by implementing the remediation patches below.
📊 Side-by-Side Comparison →
🚨

Hallucination Risk

Research

Is AI lying about your brand? This panel measures how likely LLMs are to hallucinate facts when extracting information from your page.

👻
Shadow Content Detected: 30% of your page token budget is trapped in non-rendered regions (JavaScript-dependent content invisible to AI crawlers). Combined with 55.2x token bloat, AI models are using most of their context window on noise instead of your real content. This dramatically increases hallucination probability — models fill the gap with made-up facts.
Analyzing hallucination risk…

🤖 Bot Access Matrix

GPTBot (OpenAI)
Blocked
ClaudeBot (Anthropic)
Blocked
CCBot (Common Crawl)
Blocked
Google-Extended
Blocked
Googlebot
Allowed
💡GPTBot is blocked. To appear in ChatGPT citations, add Allow: / under User-agent: GPTBot in your robots.txt.
💡ClaudeBot is blocked. To be cited by Claude, allow ClaudeBot in robots.txt.

👻 Rendering (Ghost Ratio) Docs

Ghost Ratio 30%
0% — Safe 50% 100% — Risk
Status Server-Side Rendered (Safe)
Rendering Type Hybrid

📊 Structure & Information Density Docs

Structure Grade 66/100 — Good
Structured Elements 544 elements (544 lists, 0 rows, 0 headers)
Total Words4156
Raw Density13.1%

🏷️ Schema Health Docs

Organization Schema ❌ Missing
Product / Service Schema ⚠️ Not Found
Total Schema Blocks1 block(s) — Basic (low value for AI)

Schema Coverage Map

0/7 schema types detected
❌ Organization
❌ Product/Service
❌ Breadcrumb
❌ FAQ
❌ Article
❌ WebSite
💡Organization schema missing. AI models cannot identify your brand entity. Without it, your brand won't appear in Knowledge Panels or be associated with your content.
💡Product / Service schema missing. AI models don't know this is a SaaS product. Add Product or SoftwareApplication schema so AI understands what you offer and can surface pricing/features.
💡BreadcrumbList schema missing. AI cannot understand your site hierarchy or how pages relate to each other.
💡FAQ schema missing. Adding FAQPage schema lets AI models directly extract Q&A pairs for Featured Snippets and chatbot answers.
💡WebSite schema missing. Add WebSite + SearchAction so Google can generate a Sitelinks Search Box for your brand in AI results.

📐 AI Efficiency Metrics Docs

43
AI Extractability
High
Crawl Cost
Critical
Blocklist Risk
Extractability43/100 — AI models can partially extract answers from this page
Crawl CostHigh (100/100) — expensive for AI crawlers to process
Blocklist RiskCritical — 4 of 5 AI crawlers blocked

Token Bloat Research

1%
🗑️ 99%
Useful Content (35.9 KB)Bloat (1943.6 KB)
Token Bloat Ratio50×+ — Bloated

Multimodal Readiness

Visual Context51% Optimized for Vision
Image Alt Coverage121 / 235 images have alt text

TDM Rights

TDM-Reservation HeaderNot set
X-Robots-Tag: noaiNot set
💡Your HTML is 1979.5 KB, but only 35.9 KB is text. 1% useful / 99% bloat. AI crawlers have limited context windows (e.g. 128k tokens). This level of bloat (50×+) risks context-window truncation by ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. Reduce inline scripts, CSS, hydration payloads, and tracking code.

🔥 Structural Entropy Check Research

0 Entropy
Poor Token Bloat: High
Noise Ratio: 98.2% · SNR: 0.02 · Signal: 9187 / Noise: 497553 tokens

🔬 AI-Crawler Simulation

See your website the way AI crawlers do. CSS stripped, structure labeled, content chunked.

🌐
This is what humans see — styled, branded, visual.
Toggle to "AI Agent View" to see what GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and other AI crawlers actually extract from this page.
🤖

AI Answer Preview

NEW

See how AI models summarize your site. Left: your actual content. Right: what the LLM extracts and says about you.

Simulating AI extraction…

🔧 Tech Stack

FrameworkExpress
AI-Readiness Score55/100
Servercloudflare
CDNcloudflare
HTTP Status200
Load Time2457 ms
Raw HTML Size1979.5 KB
Visible Text Size35.9 KB

Performance & Speed

11/100 20 % of Global Score 🟢 High Confidence

⏱️ Time to First Byte

2457 ms
Slow — bots may time out or deprioritise

Google considers <200 ms "good". AI crawlers may have even shorter timeouts.

📦 Page Weight

5634
DOM nodes
1980 KB
HTML payload
Heavy page — consider reducing DOM complexity

🗄️ Cache & CDN

  • ✓ Cache-Control header → public, max-age=30
  • ✓ CDN cache status → MISS
  • ✓ CDN detected → cloudflare

🔬 Tracker Tax

0
tracker scripts
0
third-party domains
0.0%
token overhead
Minimal tracker load — clean signal for bots
📐 How the Performance Pillar score is calculated

Perf Pillar = TTFB (35 pts) + Page Weight (25 pts) + Cache/CDN (20 pts) + Tracker Tax (20 pts)

TTFB <200 ms = full marks. DOM >3000 or payload >300 KB incurs heavy penalties. Tracker scripts beyond 5 reduce score.

🏗️

Architecture & Trust

75/100 15 % of Global Score 🟢 High Confidence

🗺️ Sitemap & Robots

  • ✓ Sitemap declared in robots.txt → https://www.independent.ie/sitemap/sitemap_googlenews.xml
  • ✓ Googlebot allowed
  • ✗ GPTBot allowed
  • ✗ ClaudeBot allowed

🔗 Linking

585
internal links
24
external links
Good internal linking — helps crawlers discover content

🔒 Security & Trust

  • ✗ HSTS header (Strict-Transport-Security)
  • ✗ Content-Security-Policy header
  • ✓ HTTP status 200 OK (got 200)

♿ Accessibility Signals

  • ✓ HTML lang attribute → en
  • ✓ Meta viewport for mobile
  • ✗ Single H1 for screen readers
📐 How the Architecture Pillar score is calculated

Arch Pillar = Sitemap & Robots (30 pts) + Linking (25 pts) + Security (25 pts) + Accessibility (20 pts)

Having a valid sitemap, allowing AI bots, HSTS, and a good internal link count are the highest-impact items.

🏅 AI-Verified Trust Badge

Your site scores 43/100. Reach 80+ to unlock the green "AI-Verified" badge. Fix the issues below to improve your score.

AI-Verified badge for independent.ie
Pending Audit — score below 80 threshold
<a href="https://seodiff.io/radar/domains/independent.ie" rel="noopener"><img src="https://seodiff.io/api/v1/badge?domain=independent.ie" alt="AI-Verified by SEODiff" width="280" height="52"></a>

💡 Paste in your site footer, GitHub README, or email signature. Badge updates automatically as your score changes.

� Deep Crawl Analysis 1 pages · Deep-10

Homepage ACRI
43
Single-page score
+23
Subpages outperform homepage
Δ delta
Site-Wide ACRI
66
Avg across 1 pages · Range 66–66
Total Words
703
Avg Bloat
166.2×
Ext. Citations
18
Page Type ACRI Token Bloat Words Status
https://independent.ie/contact
How to contact us and other useful information | Irish Independent
support 66 166.2× 703
🔗
Outbound External Citations
18 unique external domains cited across 1 pages
cartell.ie ×1
member.independent.ie ×1
epaper.independentnewsstand.ie ×1
carsireland.ie ×1
subscribe.independent.ie ×1
reach-delpac.ie ×1
mediahuis.com ×1
careers.mediahuis.ie ×1
🔄 Re-Crawl & Update 📡 Track this Domain

Scores update automatically each month. Create a free account for on-demand re-crawls (3/month free).

🔌 API Access

Pull this data programmatically. All sub-page metrics are available via our public API.

curl https://seodiff.io/api/v1/deep10/domain/independent.ie

Get your free API key — 100 requests/month included.

🔗 Similar finance Sites

Domains with a similar tech stack, industry, and AI readiness profile to independent.ie. Compare side-by-side.

Domain ACRI AI Score Tech Stack Token Bloat Schema
independent.ie (this site) 43 15 Express 55.2× 1
bnn.ca 41 15 Express 52.6× 1 Compare →
bnnbloomberg.ca 40 15 Express 52.7× 1 Compare →
wealthmanagement.com 41 63 Express 59.0× 1 Compare →
binance.bh 51 72 Express 53.9× 1 Compare →
payufin.in 35 65 Express 54.9× 0 Compare →
Compare All 5 Similar Sites →
🩹

Remediation Patches

COPY-PASTE

Auto-generated code fixes tailored to independent.ie. Copy and paste these into your codebase to improve AI visibility. These patches are mathematically proven to increase extraction accuracy →

Add Organization JSON-LD
High Impact ⏱ 5 min
AI models cannot identify your brand entity without Organization schema. This is the #1 fix for AI visibility.
html
<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Organization",
  "name": "Independent",
  "url": "https://independent.ie",
  "logo": "https://www.independent.ie/extra/assets/img/favicons/apple-touch-icon.png?v=20251209T160542",
  "sameAs": []
}
</script>
Add WebSite + SearchAction JSON-LD
High Impact ⏱ 5 min
Enables the Sitelinks Search Box in Google and allows AI to understand your site structure.
html
<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "WebSite",
  "name": "Independent",
  "url": "https://independent.ie",
  "potentialAction": {
    "@type": "SearchAction",
    "target": "https://independent.ie/search?q={search_term_string}",
    "query-input": "required name=search_term_string"
  }
}
</script>
Allow GPTBot in robots.txt
High Impact ⏱ 2 min
GPTBot is blocked — your content cannot appear in ChatGPT citations. Add this to your robots.txt:
text
User-agent: GPTBot
Allow: /

User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Allow: /
Allow ClaudeBot in robots.txt
Medium Impact ⏱ 2 min
ClaudeBot is blocked — Claude cannot cite your content. Many AI assistants rely on it.
text
User-agent: ClaudeBot
Allow: /

User-agent: anthropic-ai
Allow: /
Reduce Token Bloat
Medium Impact ⏱ 1–2 hrs
Only 1% of your HTML is useful content. AI crawlers waste context window tokens on bloat.
html
<!-- Move inline CSS to external stylesheets -->
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/css/main.css">

<!-- Move inline scripts to external files with defer -->
<script src="/js/app.js" defer></script>

<!-- Remove duplicate navigation blocks -->
<!-- Keep only ONE <nav> in the <header> -->

<!-- Ensure <main> wraps your primary content -->
<main>
  <!-- Your content here — this is what AI sees first -->
</main>
📈

Projected Impact

ROI EST.

If you apply the patches above, here's the estimated improvement for independent.ie:

Current Score
15
Projected Score
46
Improvement
+31 pts
Allow GPTBot +8 pts
Allow ClaudeBot +5 pts
Add Organization schema +6 pts
Add WebSite schema +4 pts
Reduce token bloat +5 pts
Add FAQ schema +3 pts

*Estimates based on SEODiff's scoring model. Actual results depend on implementation quality.

📋 Data Export

Download scores and metadata for audits, client reports, or CI/CD pipelines. Exports contain computed metrics only (no copyrighted content).

All data is generated automatically and updated with each crawl. JSON exports contain scores and metadata only (no copyrighted content).

Is this your company?

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🧭 Self-Diffing (Private Layer)

For owned domains, combine this world snapshot with private drift + regression history.
Template Drift
Track in My Site
Drift → Traffic Impact
In development coming soon
Regression Incidents
Track in My Site
Internal Linking
Deep Audit graph
Semantic Structure
GEO view in Deep Audit
Content Quality
Thin/duplicate tracking

🕒 History

Score over timeAvailable in My Site history
Drift eventsTemplate timeline + incidents
Drift → Revenue AttributionComing soon
Schema/rendering/extractability changesTracked per scan in project history