plos.org 71 B
🛡️ SEO 71 🤖 GEO 67 ⚡ Perf 68 🏗️ Arch 83

plos.org — Global SEODiff Score 71/100

plos.org
📊

The AI-Readiness profile for plos.org is strong: an ACRI of 82/100 places it ahead of 96% of domains in the index. Compared to other infrastructure sites (avg score: 57), plos.org performs above the benchmark, suggesting strong competitive positioning in AI search. Server-side rendering keeps the ghost ratio near zero, giving AI systems direct access to all visible content. The bloated 31.3× token ratio highlights an urgent need to clean up non-content markup, scripts, and navigation clutter. Minimal structured data (1 block) limits the site's ability to communicate entity relationships to AI systems. The site maintains an open-door policy for AI crawlers — GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and other major agents are all allowed.

71
B — Global SEODiff Score
Comprehensive search visibility assessment
Strong foundations, but AI Readiness (67) is your bottleneck.
🎯 Top Fix: Reduce token bloat (31×) → +5–10 pts
🔬 Automated SEODiff Assessment · Snapshot: Mar 17, 2026 · 📋 API
📈 ACRI Trend 3 snapshots
Mar 6 Mar 17
🔔 Recent AI Indexing Activity
No recent changes detected by adaptive crawler.
Does your site score higher than plos.org?
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)71 × 0.25 = 17.8
🤖 AI Readiness / GEO (40% weight)67 × 0.40 = 26.8
⚡ Performance (20% weight)68 × 0.20 = 13.6
🏗️ Architecture & Trust (15% weight)83 × 0.15 = 12.4
Weighted sum = 17.8 + 26.8 + 13.6 + 12.4
Global SEODiff Score = 71 (B)
📊 ACRI Sub-Scores (AI Readiness Detail)
100
Bot Access
avg 92
100
Rendering
avg 93
63
Structure
avg 35
42
Schema
avg 9
85
Tech Stack
avg 63
🔀
Visibility Delta: Google vs AI
Google (Tranco)
Top 0.1%
Rank #1136
Aligned
Gap
AI (ACRI)
Top 4%
Score 82/100

plos.org has balanced Google and AI visibility — both rank roughly in the same tier. ACRI measures technical crawler readiness. Read the methodology →

Why plos.org ranks here

Tech stackWordPress
RenderingSSR
Schema coverage1 blocks
Token bloat31.3×

Fastest improvements

  • 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

71/100 25 % of Global Score 🟢 High Confidence

📝 Title Tag

52 chars
Good length

Optimal range: 30–60 characters for SERP display.

📋 Meta Description

202 chars
Too long

Optimal range: 120–160 characters for snippet control.

🔤 Heading Hierarchy

  • ✓ Exactly 1 <h1> tag — found 1
  • ✓ Has <h2> headings — found 2
  • ✓ <h2> not before <h1>

🔍 Indexability

  • ✓ Canonical tag present → https://plos.org/
  • ✓ No noindex directive
  • ✓ Meta viewport set
  • ✓ HTML lang attribute → en-US
  • ➖ Hreflang tags — N/A (single language site)
  • ✓ Googlebot allowed by robots.txt

🌐 Social / OpenGraph

  • ✓ og:title — Leading the future of open science publishing - PLOS
  • ✓ og:description — Discover how we are transforming scholarly publishing with a mission-driven commitment to open science, research integrity, and innovation that benefits researchers, institutions, and society worldwide.
  • ✓ og:image — preview
  • ✓ twitter:card — summary_large_image
📐 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

67/100 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 infrastructure sector, safely.co.jp (ACRI: 90) 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 →
plos.org
61
Your ACRI Score
90
Industry Peer ACRI
AI models prioritize pages with strong semantic structure and schema coverage. safely.co.jp has schema coverage of 3 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.

Analyzing hallucination risk…

🤖 Bot Access Matrix

GPTBot (OpenAI)
Allowed
ClaudeBot (Anthropic)
Allowed
CCBot (Common Crawl)
Allowed
Google-Extended
Allowed
Googlebot
Allowed

👻 Rendering (Ghost Ratio) Docs

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

📊 Structure & Information Density Docs

Structure Grade 63/100 — Good
Structured Elements 84 elements (84 lists, 0 rows, 0 headers)
Total Words705
Raw Density11.9%

🏷️ Schema Health Docs

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

Schema Coverage Map

3/7 schema types detected
✅ Organization
❌ Product/Service
✅ Breadcrumb
❌ FAQ
❌ Article
✅ WebSite
💡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.
💡FAQ schema missing. Adding FAQPage schema lets AI models directly extract Q&A pairs for Featured Snippets and chatbot answers.

📐 AI Efficiency Metrics Docs

58
AI Extractability
High
Crawl Cost
None
Blocklist Risk
Extractability58/100 — AI models can partially extract answers from this page
Crawl CostHigh (80/100) — expensive for AI crawlers to process
Blocklist RiskNone — 0 of 5 AI crawlers blocked

Token Bloat Research

3%
🗑️ 97%
Useful Content (8.0 KB)Bloat (241.1 KB)
Token Bloat Ratio31.3× — Bloated

Multimodal Readiness

Visual Context100% Optimized for Vision
Image Alt Coverage2 / 2 images have alt text

TDM Rights

TDM-Reservation HeaderNot set
X-Robots-Tag: noaiNot set
💡Your HTML is 249.0 KB, but only 8.0 KB is text. 3% useful / 97% bloat. AI crawlers have limited context windows (e.g. 128k tokens). This level of bloat (31.3×) 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: 96.8% · SNR: 0.03 · Signal: 2038 / Noise: 61718 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…
🧠

The LLM Interpretation

AI-VERIFIED

SEODiff AI analyzed the extracted content of plos.org and produced this structured business intelligence. Fields marked SEMANTIC VOID indicate information the AI could not find — a critical gap in your site’s machine-readability.

Core Offering
⚠ SEMANTIC VOID
Target Audience
⚠ SEMANTIC VOID
Pricing Model
⚠ SEMANTIC VOID
🏆 Competitive Moat
Advancing open science with measurable, meaningful change
📊 Content Depth
3/10
🔄 Programmatic SEO Signals
directory listings
⚡ Key Pain Points
• No core offering described
• No target audience specified
• No pricing model mentioned
• No integration partners listed
• No compliance standards cited
Analyzed by SEODiff AI · 2026-02-27

🔧 Tech Stack

FrameworkWordPress
AI-Readiness Score85/100
Servercloudflare
CDNcloudflare
HTTP Status200
Load Time562 ms
Raw HTML Size249.0 KB
Visible Text Size8.0 KB

Performance & Speed

68/100 20 % of Global Score 🟢 High Confidence

⏱️ Time to First Byte

562 ms
Acceptable — room for improvement

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

📦 Page Weight

511
DOM nodes
249 KB
HTML payload
Moderate weight — acceptable for most scenarios

🗄️ Cache & CDN

  • ✓ Cache-Control header → public, max-age=0, s-maxage=3600
  • ✓ CDN cache status → HIT
  • ✓ CDN detected → cloudflare

🔬 Tracker Tax

1
tracker scripts
1
third-party domains
0.0%
token overhead
Minimal tracker load — clean signal for bots
js.hs-scripts.com
📐 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

83/100 15 % of Global Score 🟢 High Confidence

🗺️ Sitemap & Robots

  • ✓ Sitemap declared in robots.txt → https://plos.org/sitemap_index.xml
  • ✓ Googlebot allowed
  • ✓ GPTBot allowed
  • ✓ ClaudeBot allowed

🔗 Linking

81
internal links
1
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-US
  • ✓ 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 61/100. Reach 80+ to unlock the green "AI-Verified" badge. Fix the issues below to improve your score.

AI-Verified badge for plos.org
Pending Audit — score below 80 threshold
<a href="https://seodiff.io/radar/domains/plos.org" rel="noopener"><img src="https://seodiff.io/api/v1/badge?domain=plos.org" 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 318 pages · Deep-10

Homepage ACRI
61
Single-page score
-22
Severe hidden bloat
Δ delta
Site-Wide ACRI
39
Avg across 318 pages · Range 0–87
🔍
Hidden Bloat Detected

Homepage scores 61, but internal pages average only 39 — a -22-point gap. Blogs, docs, and legacy content are dragging down AI readability site-wide.

Topical Cohesion
17%
Topical Drift
TF-IDF cosine similarity
Total Words
130033
Avg Bloat
748.5×
RAG Fractures [?]
2
⚠️
2 RAG-Chunking Fractures Detected

Poorly formatted tables or pricing grids on 2 pages will be split incorrectly during RAG chunking, causing AI models to hallucinate prices and features.

Page Type ACRI Token Bloat Words Status
https://plos.org/privacy-policy-archive/
Privacy Policy – Archive - PLOS
pricing 87 4.2× 17719 💰 Pricing
https://plos.org/libraries/partners/
Institutional Partners - PLOS
pricing 85 7.9× 17303 💰 Pricing
https://plos.org/privacy-policy/
Privacy Policy - PLOS
pricing 71 11.4× 4859 💰 Pricing
https://plos.org/view/commitment-map/
Commitment Map - PLOS
pricing 64 160.6× 2580 💰 Pricing
https://plos.org/about/board-of-directors/
Diverse global leaders committed to advancing open science - PLOS
pricing 63 29.0× 1937 💰 Pricing
https://plos.org/terms-of-use/
Terms of Use - PLOS
pricing 63 23.1× 2188 💰 Pricing
https://plos.org/terms-of-use-archive/
Terms of Use Archive - PLOS
pricing 63 25.6× 1946 💰 Pricing
https://plos.org/resource/open-peer-review/
Open Peer Review - PLOS
pricing 63 27.6× 1792 💰 Pricing
https://plos.org/libraries/terms-of-service/
Terms of Service - PLOS
pricing 63 25.8× 1952 💰 Pricing
https://plos.org/research-communities/health-literacy/
Health Literacy Research - PLOS
pricing 61 55.8× 1249 💰 Pricing
https://plos.org/research-communities/food-security/
Food Security Research - PLOS
pricing 61 63.3× 1058 💰 Pricing
https://plos.org/research-communities/artificial-intelligence/
Artificial Intelligence Research - PLOS
pricing 61 63.3× 1132 💰 Pricing
https://plos.org/resources/editor-center/
Editor Center - PLOS
pricing 60 75.3× 754 💰 Pricing
https://plos.org/resources/writing-center/
Writing Center - PLOS
pricing 60 77.7× 720 💰 Pricing
https://plos.org/resources/for-reviewers/
For Reviewers - PLOS
pricing 60 98.7× 570 💰 Pricing
https://plos.org/about/executive/
Meet the Executive Team driving open science - PLOS
pricing 60 48.4× 1113 💰 Pricing
https://plos.org/blogs/about/
About PLOS Blogs - PLOS
pricing 60 46.7× 1019 💰 Pricing
https://plos.org/financial-overview/2019-2/
2019 Financial Overview - PLOS
pricing 60 68.0× 739 💰 Pricing
https://plos.org/financial-overview/2018-2/
2018 Financial Overview - PLOS
pricing 60 56.6× 868 💰 Pricing
https://plos.org/open-science-policies/
PLOS journal policies
pricing 60 46.5× 1128 💰 Pricing
Showing 20 of 100 pages. Unlock full subpage table →
📂
Health by Sub-Directory
Average ACRI and top issues aggregated by URL path prefix
Path Pages Avg ACRI Ghost % Bloat Top Issue
/subject_area/ 134 30 1% 1271.6× Bot Blocked
/resource/ 24 57 1% 86.0× Bot Blocked
/country/ 23 36 1% 804.0× Bot Blocked
/journal/ 16 40 1% 326.0× Bot Blocked
/journal_characteristic/ 11 33 1% 1048.4× Bot Blocked
/research-communities/ 10 59 1% 80.3× Bot Blocked
/libraries/ 10 54 1% 123.5× Bot Blocked
/article_type/ 7 30 1% 1271.5× Bot Blocked
/about/ 6 52 1% 126.5× Bot Blocked
/event/ 6 40 1% 485.4× Bot Blocked
/financial-overview/ 6 60 1% 55.5× Bot Blocked
/resources/ 5 56 1% 110.3× Bot Blocked
/agreement_type/ 4 40 1% 355.1× Bot Blocked
/media/ 4 55 1% 97.8× Bot Blocked
/blogs/ 3 50 1% 210.9× Bot Blocked
🔗
Outbound External Citations
0 unique external domains cited across 318 pages
journals.plos.org ×312
collections.plos.org ×312
theplosblog.plos.org ×312
linkedin.com ×311
bsky.app ×311
facebook.com ×311
creativecommons.org ×6
osf.io ×5
🔄 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/plos.org

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

🔗 Similar infrastructure Sites

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

Domain ACRI AI Score Tech Stack Token Bloat Schema
plos.org (this site) 61 82 WordPress 31.3× 1
tokk-kansai.jp 85 90 WordPress 2.5× 1 Compare →
profitserver.ru 86 90 WordPress 3.8× 2 Compare →
profitserver.net 86 90 WordPress 3.8× 2 Compare →
driphydration.com 86 95 WordPress 1.9× 2 Compare →
hi-ad.jp 86 90 WordPress 3.1× 5 Compare →
Compare All 5 Similar Sites →

📊 Semantic Share of Voice

How often would an AI cite plos.org when users ask about topics in this domain's niche? We run entity queries through our 188k-page search index and measure citation probability.

Analyzing citation landscape…

🎭

Bait & Switch Delta

A 15 PAGES

Compares your homepage rendering quality with inner pages. A high drift score means AI crawlers see a polished homepage but degraded inner content — the "bait & switch" that erodes trust.

50
Homepage ACRI
53
Inner Avg ACRI
-3
ACRI Delta
70%
Homepage Ghost
69%
Inner Avg Ghost
2
Drift Score [?]
Worst Inner Pages
50 70% pricing https://plos.org/blog
40 70% pricing https://plos.org/contact
50 70% pricing https://plos.org/faq
🛡️

E-E-A-T Trust Signals

B 60/100

Trust indicators extracted from surface pages. These signals help AI systems verify your site's Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.

Physical Address
Phone Number
Email Contact
About Page
Contact Page
Privacy Policy
Terms of Service
Named Leadership
Address: 1875 Mission Street Suite 103 #188 San Francisco, CA 94103 US (Mailing address) plos@plos
🔗

Citation Profile

25 DOMAINS

Outbound citation patterns across surface-crawled pages. Sites that cite diverse, authoritative sources signal higher E-E-A-T to AI systems.

115
Total Links
25
Unique Domains
7.7
Avg/Page
22%
Diversity
theplosblog.plos.org facebook.com collections.plos.org bsky.app linkedin.com journals.plos.org everyone.plos.org biologue.plos.org google.com explore.plos.org
🏘️ Outbound Neighborhood Trust Avg Trust: 30.9

AI trust scores for the domains plos.org links to. Citing high-trust sources lifts your own credibility signal.

🩹

Remediation Patches

COPY-PASTE

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

Reduce Token Bloat
Medium Impact ⏱ 1–2 hrs
Only 3% 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>
Add FAQ Schema
Medium Impact ⏱ 10 min
FAQ schema lets AI models directly extract Q&A pairs. This is the easiest way to get featured in AI responses.
html
<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "FAQPage",
  "mainEntity": [
    {
      "@type": "Question",
      "name": "What is Plos?",
      "acceptedAnswer": {
        "@type": "Answer",
        "text": "Add your answer here — describe what Plos does in 1-2 sentences."
      }
    },
    {
      "@type": "Question",
      "name": "How does Plos work?",
      "acceptedAnswer": {
        "@type": "Answer",
        "text": "Explain the key features and how users interact with Plos."
      }
    }
  ]
}
</script>
📈

Projected Impact

ROI EST.

If you apply the patches above, here's the estimated improvement for plos.org:

Current Score
82
Projected Score
90
Improvement
+8 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?

Monitor your AI visibility score weekly and get alerted when changes happen.

Start Free →

🧭 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
🔍 Found indexing issues?
Run a free deep audit to diagnose crawled-not-indexed, soft 404s, redirect errors, and more.
Free Deep Audit → GSC Error Guide →