williams-sonoma.com
Evidence collected August 31, 2026 · 43 polite, robots.txt-respecting requests · every claim cites what it saw
D
52/100 — advocacy readiness(reduced confidence: parts of the evidence were unobservable — see below)
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.
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.
Your homepage share card is missing og:title, og:description, og:image
The homepage lacks og:title, og:description, og:image. When anyone — including your own employees — shares your homepage link, the preview card renders incomplete (no image means most platforms show a bare grey box).
Evidence: homepage HTML.
The fix: Add the missing tags to the homepage template: og:title, og:description, og:image. Minutes of work, visible on every share afterward.
0 of 24 sampled pages carry Article structured data
None of the 24 content pages sampled carry Article structured data. Machine readers cannot tell these pages are articles, or when they were published, or by whom.
Evidence — content page sample
- https://www.williams-sonoma.com/recipe/apple-cider-sage-braised-pork.html
- https://www.williams-sonoma.com/recipe/artichoke-and-lemon-fritto-misto.html
- https://www.williams-sonoma.com/recipe/chicken-stew-in-white-wine.html
- https://www.williams-sonoma.com/recipe/chucks-golden-ginger-cake.html
- https://www.williams-sonoma.com/recipe/clams-with-sausage-and-tomatoes.html
- https://www.williams-sonoma.com/recipe/creamy-gratin-of-winter-vegetables.html
- https://www.williams-sonoma.com/recipe/crostini-with-ricotta--pears-and-spiced-walnuts.html
- https://www.williams-sonoma.com/recipe/escargot-with-garlic-and-herb-butter.html
- … and 16 more in the sample
The fix: Emit Article (or BlogPosting) JSON-LD with headline, datePublished and author in the content template.
No structured data on your homepage
The homepage carries no JSON-LD schema.org markup. Machine readers — search engines and AI assistants alike — get no structured statement of who you are (Organization, name, logo, sameAs profiles).
Evidence: homepage HTML.
The fix: Add an Organization JSON-LD block to the homepage: name, url, logo, and sameAs links to your official social profiles.
0 of 24 sampled pages carry a share description (og:description)
None of the 24 content pages sampled carry a share description (og:description). The preview card shows the title with no supporting line.
Evidence — content page sample
- https://www.williams-sonoma.com/recipe/apple-cider-sage-braised-pork.html
- https://www.williams-sonoma.com/recipe/artichoke-and-lemon-fritto-misto.html
- https://www.williams-sonoma.com/recipe/chicken-stew-in-white-wine.html
- https://www.williams-sonoma.com/recipe/chucks-golden-ginger-cake.html
- https://www.williams-sonoma.com/recipe/clams-with-sausage-and-tomatoes.html
- https://www.williams-sonoma.com/recipe/creamy-gratin-of-winter-vegetables.html
- https://www.williams-sonoma.com/recipe/crostini-with-ricotta--pears-and-spiced-walnuts.html
- https://www.williams-sonoma.com/recipe/escargot-with-garlic-and-herb-butter.html
- … and 16 more in the sample
The fix: Emit the post excerpt as og:description in the template.
Your shareable content lives in only 2 sections
All shareable content sits in: recipe, docs_support. Variety matters for advocacy — different employees share different things (news, case studies, culture stories, events).
Evidence: sitemap URL classification.
The fix: Add at least one more content type employees would plausibly share — customer stories and culture posts are the usual gaps.
No culture or life-at pages anywhere in your sitemap
Of 53,935 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
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.
Share controls are on nearly every sampled page
24 of 24 sampled pages (100%) carry a visible share control.
Evidence: content page sample — 24 of 24 sampled pages.
What could not be seen
Anything the reader could not observe is listed here rather than guessed at or silently skipped.
Content freshness is not observable here
Your sitemap publishes lastmod dates, but they look machine-generated rather than edit history (100% of all lastmod values fall on a single day (2026-08-31), which is the signature of a site-wide rebuild rather than individual edits.), so I cannot read them as freshness and have not guessed.
Evidence: sitemap lastmod analysis.
The fix: Emit real last-modified dates in the sitemap. Credible freshness data helps every machine reader — search, AI, and tools like this one — represent you accurately.
For the record
llms.txt is present
An llms.txt file is served. Reported for completeness: Google has said it does not support llms.txt, no major AI vendor has confirmed consuming it, and large-scale studies found no correlation with AI citations. I record it and weight it at zero.
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 — 50.3/100 (reduced confidence)
| Signal | Points | What was observed |
|---|---|---|
| Volume floor | 40/40 | 8443 shareable pages after collapsing localized duplicates |
| Section diversity | 4/30 | 1 shareable section(s): recipe |
| Shareable share | 6.3/30 | 15.7% of the canonical inventory is shareable content |
Recency was not scored: this site publishes lastmod dates, but they look machine-generated rather than edit history, so they cannot be read as freshness.
Recipe/food-editorial pages are the largest shareable section here (8443 canonical page(s)). They are counted as shareable content deliberately: retailer recipe programmes are editorial content marketing, not catalog inventory.
Shareability — 82/100
| Signal | Points | What was observed |
|---|---|---|
| Open Graph image — without one, a shared link renders as a bare grey box | 35/35 | 24 of 24 sampled pages (100%) |
| Open Graph title on the shared card | 15/15 | 24 of 24 sampled pages (100%) |
| Open Graph description on the shared card | 0/15 | 0 of 24 sampled pages (0%) |
| A visible share control on the page | 30/30 | 24 of 24 sampled pages (100%) |
| Twitter/X card tags (near-zero weight: X falls back to Open Graph) | 0/3 | 0 of 24 sampled pages (0%) |
| Canonical URL (near-zero weight: SEO hygiene, not a sharing condition) | 2/2 | 24 of 24 sampled pages (100%) |
Employee & Culture — 22.3/100
| Signal | Points | What was observed |
|---|---|---|
| Culture / life-at pages | 0/30 | 0 culture page(s) in the canonical inventory |
| Careers page reachable | 15/15 | A careers page was found and retrieved |
| Careers depth | 0/15 | 0 careers URL(s) in the sitemap |
| Named authors on content | 7.3/25 | 29.2% of sampled pages carry a named author |
| Employee-story signals | 0/15 | No culture URLs existed to sample, so no employee-story signal could be checked |
A qualitative read of the careers page (boilerplate vs. real human stories) is not included in this number.
Employee posting activity was not scored: no company record could be matched to this domain (best candidate Kitchen Store (id 6490184) failed verification: zero employees in the index work there, so the record cannot be verified). This category is scored on website evidence alone.
AI Discoverability — 54/100
| Signal | Points | What was observed |
|---|---|---|
| AI crawler access | 45/45 | All 25 tracked AI user-agents are permitted at the site root |
| Content-Signal coherence | 9/15 | No Content-Signal declared. Neither a grant nor a restriction — scored neutrally. |
| Structured data | 0/40 | 0 schema.org type(s) on the homepage; 0% of sampled content pages carry Article schema |
| llms.txt | 0/0 | Present. Scored at zero weight deliberately: Google has said it does not support llms.txt, no major AI vendor has confirmed consuming it, and large-scale studies found no correlation with AI citations. |
robots.txt compliance is voluntary and advisory. This reports the declared policy; it is not a claim that any crawler was actually blocked.