If your score moves, this page is how you tell whether your site changed or the rubric did.
Entries marked Specification are the ones that change what a number means.
· Specification
The Open Graph check now looks at the image format
An og:image pointing at an SVG, AVIF, BMP or TIFF is marked thin evidence. None of those render in a link preview on Facebook, X, LinkedIn, WhatsApp or Slack, so the card comes out blank — and the only way to find out is to post a link and look at it.
Found on this site. Our own og:image was an SVG, and report pages pointed theirs at the 196x36 badge, which is not a card shape. Both are now generated 1200x630 PNGs, and a report card carries that report’s own score and grade.
A relative og:image is flagged for the same reason: a scraper resolving it from somewhere else gets nothing.
· Product
The command-line scanner is published
npx axray-cli <url> now works with no install and no account. It runs the same scoring modules as this site, from the same package, so the number in your terminal is the number on the report.
The unscoped name axray was refused by npm as too similar to an existing package called ax-ray, so the published name carries the -cli suffix. A global install still gives you the short axray command.
--allow-private lets it scan localhost and other private addresses, which the hosted service will never do: reaching your own dev server is not forgery, reaching ours would be.
· Specification
Checks now measure substance, not just presence
Twenty checks that could be satisfied by an empty artefact gained a substance gate: an llms.txt must say something and link somewhere, a Product must carry offers, a security.txt must name a contact, a manifest must name an endpoint.
A check whose artefact is present but hollow keeps its status, earns at most half its weight, and is labelled "thin evidence" on the report with a sentence naming what is missing.
Scores can move for pages that were passing these checks on an empty file. That is the intended correction, not a regression.
· Policy
The AX Index became opt-in
Scanning a site no longer publishes anything about it. A host appears in the public index only when somebody has proved control of the domain and asked to be listed.
Removal is one click from the report or the dashboard, takes effect immediately, and needs no explanation.
Staging, preview and internal hostnames are never listed, whoever asks.
Every listing that predated these rules was unpublished.
· Policy
Politeness limits and an opt-out
One host is fetched a limited number of times an hour across every user combined, and a crawl counts once per page.
Repeat requests for the same URL are served from a recent result rather than fetched again.
Disallowing AXRAY in your robots.txt now stops the scanner, for everybody, from the next request.
· Specification
AX specification v1.0
First public version: five pillars, 53 checks, published in full and generated from the scoring code.
Scores are comparable within a major version. A change that would move scores gets a new version and an entry here.
The rubric is versioned. Scores are comparable within a major version, and we will not silently
change what a number means — see the specification.