Advocacy Grade

steelcase.com

Evidence collected August 31, 2026 · 71 polite, robots.txt-respecting requests · every claim cites what it saw

C

57.6/100 — advocacy readiness

Graded because the reader classified enough of this site to trust the measurement. For scale: of the 350 companies in this corpus, only 126 earned a grade — for the rest I withheld it rather than grade a site the reader could not read.

72.2/100
Content Supply
52.5/100
Shareability
28/100
Employee & Culture
79/100
AI Discoverability

Read this before the numbers

This tool was built in a few days, on a stack of stated assumptions. I didn't have the time — or the inside knowledge of what buyers in this category actually optimize for — to be certain these are the metrics that matter most. The four categories and their weights are editorial judgment, not measurement: nobody has proven that these things cause employees to post, and I don't claim otherwise.

Where the evidence comes from: three of the four categories read only what your company has published on its own public site — the part you can fix on Monday. Half of Employee & Culture comes from somewhere else: aggregate counts of how many of your people posted in the last 90 days, from a licensed third-party index of public professional-network activity. Nothing here was scraped from LinkedIn by this tool. Those counts are records in an index, not a census — they undercount, they undercount small companies most, and you can't check them yourself — so each one says so where it appears, a zero is reported as "none in the index" and never as "nobody posts," and a company with fewer than 25 people in the index gets the number reported but not scored. No individual is named anywhere in this report.

To prioritize speed, this particular report was loaded using cached data; it was generated from evidence originally collected on August 31, 2026 rather than live. Reports are cached for 30 days. Every observation below is dated and cited.

What you can hold me to: every number cites its evidence and says where it came from, nothing unseen is guessed at, robots.txt is respected on every fetch, and when this tool can't read a site it says so instead of issuing a grade.

What was found — most fixable first

Ranked by impact × ease of fixing, not by category. Counts describe the pages actually read, and each finding cites them.

Issue

Only 9 of 24 sampled pages carry a share image (og:image)

9 of 24 sampled content pages (37.5%) carry a share image (og:image); the rest do not. Without an og:image, most platforms render a shared link as a bare grey box.

Evidence — content page sample
  • https://www.steelcase.com/research/articles/agile-case-study-leadership-communication/
  • https://www.steelcase.com/events/intalere-member-conference-2016/
  • https://www.steelcase.com/events/ted2016/
  • https://www.steelcase.com/press-releases/steelcase-health-reveals-regard-at-healthcare-design-2012/
  • https://www.steelcase.com/press-releases/steelcase-microsoft-announce-development-technology-enabled-spaces-designed-boost-creative-work/
  • https://www.steelcase.com/press-releases/steelcase-unveils-new-category-of-collaborative-seating-at-neocon-2008/
  • https://www.steelcase.com/resources/documents/architectural-process-installation-scope-of-work-sample/
  • https://www.steelcase.com/resources/documents/co-brand-think-better-printed-invitation-zip/
  • … and 7 more in the sample

The fix: Add a default share image to the content template, and per-post images where you have art.

Issue

Only 13 of 24 sampled pages carry a share description (og:description)

13 of 24 sampled content pages (54.2%) carry a share description (og:description); the rest do not. The preview card shows the title with no supporting line.

Evidence — content page sample
  • https://www.steelcase.com/resources/documents/architectural-process-installation-scope-of-work-sample/
  • https://www.steelcase.com/resources/documents/co-brand-think-better-printed-invitation-zip/
  • https://www.steelcase.com/resources/documents/healthcare-time-for-change-pdf-v2/
  • https://www.steelcase.com/resources/documents/power-of-place-interactive-tool-setup-and-usage-guide-desktop-and-laptop/
  • https://www.steelcase.com/resources/documents/sc-brand-state-of-work-blur-the-edges-nametags-zip/
  • https://www.steelcase.com/resources/documents/semiprivate-dyadic-treatment-area-pdf/
  • https://www.steelcase.com/resources/documents/smarttools-direct-link-best-practices/
  • https://www.steelcase.com/resources/documents/talent-management-impact-mapping-office-resources-inc/
  • … and 3 more in the sample

The fix: Emit the post excerpt as og:description in the template.

Opportunity

Your job listings are invisible without JavaScript

Your careers page (https://www.steelcase.com/about/steelcase/careers) returns HTML, but the job listings are injected client-side — a plain reader sees a page with no roles on it. Machine readers that do not execute JavaScript (many crawlers and AI assistants) cannot see that you are hiring.

Evidence — careers page probes
  • https://www.steelcase.com/about/steelcase/careers
  • https://www.steelcase.com/careers

The fix: Server-render at least the role titles and locations, or publish jobs in structured data (schema.org JobPosting).

Opportunity

No culture or life-at pages anywhere in your sitemap

Of 4,535 canonical URLs, zero classify as culture content — no life-at pages, employee stories, or team spotlights. This is the most common gap this tool finds, and the most directly advocacy-shaped one: it is the content employees share proudest and first. Your people's own posting is scored separately, below.

Evidence: sitemap URL classification.

The fix: Start small: one employee-story post a month, indexed in the sitemap. The section can grow from there.

What's already working

Working

All tracked AI user-agents may read your site

robots.txt permits all 25 tracked AI user-agents at the site root, so AI search engines and assistants that honor robots.txt can read and cite you.

Evidence: robots.txt.

Working

Your homepage share card is complete

The homepage carries og:title, og:description and og:image, so a shared homepage link renders a full preview card.

Evidence: homepage HTML.

For the record

Note

No llms.txt

No llms.txt file is served. This costs nothing today — the evidence that llms.txt affects anything is weak — so I do not count it against you.

Evidence: llms.txt fetch.

How the numbers break down

Weights: Content Supply 30% · Shareability 25% · Employee & Culture 25% (half what the site says, half what employees do) · AI Discoverability 20%. The weights are editorial judgment about what an advocacy program draws on — not the result of a study. Every row cites the observation behind it and says whether it was read from your site or from the licensed index.

Content Supply — 72.2/100

SignalPointsWhat was observed
Volume floor34.6/402324 shareable pages after collapsing localized duplicates
Section diversity19/304 shareable section(s): case_study, resource, news_press, event_webinar
Shareable share18.2/3051.2% of the canonical inventory is shareable content
Recency adjustment0.4/81251 of 4535 dated URLs updated in the last year (28%)

Shareability — 52.5/100

SignalPointsWhat was observed
Open Graph image — without one, a shared link renders as a bare grey box13.1/359 of 24 sampled pages (37.5%)
Open Graph title on the shared card9.4/1515 of 24 sampled pages (62.5%)
Open Graph description on the shared card8.1/1513 of 24 sampled pages (54.2%)
A visible share control on the page18.8/3015 of 24 sampled pages (62.5%)
Twitter/X card tags (near-zero weight: X falls back to Open Graph)1.9/315 of 24 sampled pages (62.5%)
Canonical URL (near-zero weight: SEO hygiene, not a sharing condition)1.3/215 of 24 sampled pages (62.5%)

Employee & Culture — 28/100

SignalPointsWhat was observed
What the site says (50 of 100)
Culture / life-at pages0/150 culture page(s) in the canonical inventory
Careers page reachable7.5/7.5A careers page was found and retrieved
Careers depth0/7.50 careers URL(s) in the sitemap
Named authors on content0.6/12.54.2% of sampled pages carry a named author
Employee-story signals0/7.5No culture URLs existed to sample, so no employee-story signal could be checked
What employees do (50 of 100)
Employees posting (last 90 days)7.9/25356 of 5650 indexed employees posted in the last 90 days (6.3%). licensed third-party index (not independently verifiable); 5650 of 9409 employees covered.
Decision-makers posting3.3/1551 decision-makers posted in the last 90 days (0.9% of indexed employees). licensed third-party index (not independently verifiable).
Company page posting cadence8.9/10143 company post(s) in the last 90 days in the index. licensed third-party index (not independently verifiable).

A qualitative read of the careers page (boilerplate vs. real human stories) is not included in this number.

Half of this category is measured from employee posting activity in a licensed third-party index (5650 of 9409 employees covered). Those counts are records in a third-party index, a lower bound the visitor cannot verify independently; the other half is what the website itself shows.

AI Discoverability — 79/100

SignalPointsWhat was observed
AI crawler access45/45All 25 tracked AI user-agents are permitted at the site root
Content-Signal coherence9/15No Content-Signal declared. Neither a grant nor a restriction — scored neutrally.
Structured data25/404 schema.org type(s) on the homepage; 62.5% of sampled content pages carry Article schema
llms.txt0/0Not present. This costs nothing — the evidence that llms.txt affects anything is weak.

robots.txt compliance is voluntary and advisory. This reports the declared policy; it is not a claim that any crawler was actually blocked.