MLI Methodology

I1 — Organization identity declaration

What it measures: Whether the organization is declared in machine-readable form via JSON-LD Organization or LocalBusiness schema, with verified identity links.

Why it matters: Without an Organization declaration, an agent infers who you are from third-party mentions — Yelp, Google Business, social platforms, news coverage. Other voices speak for you. With it, you author your own first-party identity claim.

Signals

• JSON-LD contains Organization, LocalBusiness, NGO, or another organization subtype
• Properties present: name, url, logo, sameAs, description, address
• sameAs points to verified profiles or official records

I2 — Service-type specificity Very high public-interest stakes

What it measures: Whether the page declares the correct schema.org service-type for what the organization actually does — not just generic Organization.

Why it matters: An agent answering "where can I get free legal help in Maryland in Spanish" needs to filter on service type. Generic Organization schema offers no service-type axis to filter on. LegalService does. The same applies to GovernmentService, SocialService, MedicalClinic, and dozens of other subtypes. Without a specific service-type schema, clinics rank below service-typed competitors in service-type-specific filters, and sit in the long tail of undifferentiated generic Organization results — making them harder to surface in agent searches.

The same mechanism shapes commercial discovery. An agent answering "find me a same-day plumber in Oakland" needs Plumber or HomeAndConstructionBusiness — not a generic Organization. Sites that ship the right subtype rank above competitors that don't, in any service-typed query.

Signals

• jsonLdTypes includes a service-specific type appropriate to the page content
• Required properties for that subtype (e.g., LegalService should have serviceType, areaServed, provider)

I3 — Source authority and credentials Very high public-interest stakes

What it measures: Whether the site declares the authority signals that distinguish authoritative voices from predatory ones — accreditation, parent organization, professional credentials, government TLD, free-access status.

Why it matters: Machine legibility alone doesn't distinguish a BIA-accredited immigration legal services organization from a notario. (Notarios are unlicensed practitioners who exploit a name collision with Latin American notarios públicos to advertise legal services they aren't qualified to provide.) Commercial immigration service providers — both licensed and unlicensed — invest in search marketing in ways that underfunded community legal aid organizations typically cannot. Source-authority signals let agents and agent users tell the difference.

Signals

• Schema for hasCredential, accreditedBy, parentOrganization, funder, award
• isAccessibleForFree: true where applicable
• TLD signals (.gov, .edu, .org consistent with mission)
• HTML links to accrediting bodies (BIA, ABA, state bars, accreditation councils)
• nonprofitStatus for tax-exempt orgs

R1 — Agent contract

What it measures: Whether the site declares an explicit contract for AI agents and crawlers.

Why it matters: Without robots.txt agent directives, an agent has no signal whether it's welcome, what it can fetch, and what's off-limits. llms.txt provides an AI-readable site index. sitemap.xml aids discovery. These are the most direct findability signals and are missing from most under-resourced sites.

Signals

• robots.txt accessibility (200 response at /robots.txt)
• Presence of agent-specific User-agents (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, PerplexityBot, anthropic-ai, cohere-ai)
• llms.txt or llms-full.txt at root
• sitemap.xml declared in robots.txt or accessible at root

R2 — Initial HTML completeness

What it measures: Whether substantive content — text, forms, action paths — is present in the initial HTML, or gated behind JavaScript or third-party iframes.

Why it matters: Agents that don't execute JavaScript miss content added post-load. SPAs that render to empty shells appear blank to crawlers that don't execute JavaScript. Forms that live in third-party iframes can't be filled by an agent operating on the parent page. Sites built on frameworks that render primarily client-side, and pages whose action paths live in third-party iframes, often fail this criterion. Server-rendered pages with native forms typically pass it.

Signals

• Semantic element count in initial HTML
• Form count (forms in initial HTML, not iframe-embedded)
• Iframe count and what's inside them
• noscriptHasContent (substantial content in <noscript> indicates JS dependency)

R3 — Multilingual reach Very high public-interest stakes

What it measures: Whether the site declares its language(s), serves alternate translations via hreflang, and declares language availability in service schema.

Why it matters: A site without explicit language declarations cannot be reliably identified or prioritized in language-filtered queries. Agents must infer language from content, creating slower, lower-confidence matches that rank below sites with declared language metadata. The single most important signal for the Notice-to-Appear scenario, and for any cross-language service-finding case. Community legal aid clinics frequently translate content but fail to mark translations with hreflang, losing ranking advantages in language-specific queries and reducing discoverability to speakers of those languages.

Commercial sites face the same penalty in cross-language queries. A SaaS company serving Latin American customers without hreflang on its Spanish docs ranks below competitors that have it — even when its product is better.

Signals

• <html lang="..."> set
• <link rel="alternate" hreflang="..."> to translated pages
• availableLanguage property in service schema
• contactPoint.availableLanguage for service contacts

Skip-if: Organization is genuinely English-only and its served audience is too. This rarely applies in US service contexts and should be a documented exception.

S1 — Page type and breadcrumb

What it measures: Whether the page declares its schema.org type (Article, WebPage, ContactPage, FAQPage, Service, etc.) and provides BreadcrumbList for hierarchical context.

Why it matters: An agent extracting an answer needs to know what kind of page it's reading. A FAQPage has different extraction logic than a Service page. BreadcrumbList lets the agent place the page in site context.

Signals

• jsonLdTypes includes a page-level type matching the actual content
• BreadcrumbList present with correctly-ordered items

S2 — Heading hierarchy as content map

What it measures: Whether headings form a parseable outline an agent can use to navigate the page's content.

Why it matters: Headings are how agents map a page. Multiple H1s, skipped levels, or non-descriptive headings make extraction significantly harder. Headings with stable IDs are deep-linkable, which improves citation precision.

Signals

• h1Count (single descriptive H1 expected)
• Logical H2/H3 progression; no skipped levels
• headingHierarchyIssue (multiple H1s, or H3s without H2s)
• headingsWithId ratio

S3 — Semantic density

What it measures: Ratio of semantic landmarks (main, nav, header, footer, section, article, aside) to non-semantic div/span elements.

Why it matters: Div soup is harder to parse than semantic HTML. Agents that map pages by landmarks get nothing from a page that's all <div>. This is where MX and accessibility most clearly converge — semantic landmarks serve both screen readers and agents.

Signals

• Semantic element count vs total div/span count
• Ratio: semanticElements / (semanticElements + totalDivSpan)
• Presence of all four major landmarks (main, nav, header, footer)
• nav[aria-label] for distinguishing multiple navs

C1 — Machine-readable dates

What it measures: Whether content has datePublished and dateModified in JSON-LD, plus appropriate <time datetime> elements.

Why it matters: Agents need to decide whether to surface information or treat it as stale. Without machine-readable dates, they guess from prose ("Updated: January 2025") — which is unreliable — or assume worst-case staleness and skip the page.

Signals

• datePublished in JSON-LD
• dateModified in JSON-LD
• <time datetime="..."> elements in HTML (ISO 8601 format)

C2 — Time-sensitive markup Very high public-interest stakes

What it measures: Whether deadlines, hours, event dates, and validity periods are machine-readable.

Why it matters: A Notice to Appear recipient needs deadline awareness. A clinic's walk-in hours, a registration deadline, a court date, an application window — all must be machine-readable or agents can't filter or alert appropriately. The same mechanism governs commercial time-sensitive content: a retailer's flash sale, a conference's early-bird deadline, a SaaS webinar registration. "We are open Tuesdays 9–12" in prose can't be matched by a query like "who can I see this Tuesday morning?" — the agent has nothing to filter on.

Signals

• Event schema with startDate/endDate
• validThrough on Offer / Service
• OpeningHoursSpecification on LocalBusiness
• eventStatus for cancelled/postponed events

Skip-if: Page has no time-sensitive content (e.g., a static About page with no hours, dates, or deadlines).

C3 — Eligibility, cost, and service availability Very high public-interest stakes

What it measures: Whether audience, cost, jurisdiction, and availability of services are declared in machine-readable form.

Why it matters: An agent filtering for "free immigration help in Maryland in Spanish" needs four facts: service type (I2), free/low-cost, jurisdiction, and language (R3 covers language; this criterion covers cost and jurisdiction). An agent filtering for "EV charging open after 10pm in Austin" or "gluten-free meal delivery serving Brooklyn" needs the same filterable structure — service type, jurisdiction, hours, and dietary or product attributes — declared in machine-readable form. Without this markup, the page can't be filtered on cost or jurisdiction — and ranks below pages that can be, in service-discovery queries.

Signals

• audience with audienceType, geographicArea, eligibility qualifications
• areaServed (city, state, county, jurisdiction)
• isAccessibleForFree: true for free services; priceSpecification or price: 0; sliding-scale via priceRange
• availableLanguage at service level (overlaps with R3)
• OfferCatalog for orgs with multiple service offerings
• Operational status: businessStatus (BusinessOperating, TemporarilyClosed, PermanentlyClosed) or Offer.availability (InStock, LimitedAvailability, SoldOut)

Skip-if: Page is purely informational with no service offered (e.g., a glossary, a news article).