Search is becoming an answer, not just a list of links. This is an ongoing
measurement of how often real small and mid-sized businesses are named when
an AI assistant answers a buying-intent question about their category, and of
what their own websites do or fail to do to earn that mention.
Built from 531 website audits across
458 domains and 38 detected sectors.
The corpus runs to 2026-08-02, the date of its most recent audit.
Free to cite and quote with attribution.
The Index tracks two things separately, because “being visible to AI” is
really two problems with two different causes.
A customer asks an assistant for the best provider of a category in a place,
and the assistant answers with a handful of names. This pillar asks whether
the audited business is one of those names. Every audited business is queried
against ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, and each answer is matched
against the audited business.
This pillar is what an assistant’s crawler finds on arrival: whether
robots.txt lets it in, whether the site publishes a sitemap, whether the
homepage states the business’s identity and location in machine-readable
form. Every one of these signals is first-party, read by our own crawler
directly from the site.
Presence is the outcome; readability is the input under a site owner’s control.
A site can be perfectly marked up and still go unnamed, which is why both are
published side by side rather than combined into a single score. The signals
come from the same free scan anyone can run on their own site.
94.8%
of audited sites never surface in an AI answer
Only 10 of 193 sites were named even once across 5,978 assistant answers to buying-intent questions.
2.9%
Gemini has the widest reach in the panel
Gemini named the audited business in 2.9% of its answers, ahead of every other assistant in the panel. All four were asked the same questions about the same businesses on the same days, so the gap is a difference between assistants rather than a difference between questions.
8.9%
block at least one AI crawler in robots.txt
39 of 436 sites disallow an AI user-agent outright, most of them without distinguishing between crawlers that train models and agents that fetch a page to answer a live question.
38
sites block GPTBot; only 4 block OAI-SearchBot
Blocking is aimed at training crawlers rather than at retrieval agents. GPTBot is disallowed by 38 sites and ClaudeBot by 36, while the agents that actually fetch a page to answer a live question, OAI-SearchBot and Perplexity-User, are disallowed by 4 sites and 3 sites. A site that blocks the whole group pays for it in lost citations.
54.6%
publish any schema.org structured data
238 of 436 sites carry structured data on their homepage. The rest leave an assistant nothing to read but prose.
19.3%
publish LocalBusiness schema
The markup that states a business’s name, address and category in machine-readable form is the least-adopted signal measured here, present on 84 sites. Most of this corpus is local businesses.
Every assistant was asked the same questions about the same businesses on the
same days, so the differences below are differences between assistants.
ChatGPT answered 1,352 of its 1,544 queries;
the 192 that failed at the provider are excluded from
its denominator rather than counted as absences.
Training crawlers harvest pages to build models; retrieval agents fetch a page
in response to a live question. Blocking the first costs a site nothing in
today’s answers. Blocking the second makes the site uncitable, a far larger
consequence than the gap between these two columns.
Every figure comes from audits run through Website Auditor’s free scanner
between 2026-03-30 and 2026-08-02:
531 stored audits across 458 distinct
domains, in 38 detected sectors. Aggregates are computed
over Website Auditor’s reports, the analytics view that excludes our own parent
company auditing its own properties, so internal traffic cannot inflate a share.
The aggregate itself is committed as a SQL function and re-run unchanged for
every edition, so one edition is a comparison against the last rather than a
fresh set of judgement calls.
Every figure above comes with conditions, and these are the conditions. They
are published with the same weight as the findings.
Figures are free to reproduce with attribution and a link to this page. For the
underlying methodology, or a cut of the data for a specific sector, write to
[email protected] with
your question.
This page is the permanent home of the Index. Each new edition updates the
figures above and adds a dated row here rather than moving to a new URL, so
links and citations keep resolving to current data.
2026-08-02
Second edition. The panel grew from 175 sites to 193 sites and now runs to 2026-08-02, and the crawl-signal corpus grew from 418 sites to 436 sites. Every headline share moved by less than a point: a slightly smaller share of sites named in an answer, and a slightly smaller share blocking an AI crawler. Gemini keeps the panel’s widest reach.
2026-07-31
First edition. Cross-assistant presence measured over 2026-07-23 to 2026-07-31, the first period in which ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity were each queried through their own provider. Crawl signals measured across 418 sites audited since 2026-05-16, at one audit per domain.
The Index is built from the same free audit anyone can run on their own site.
It checks the AI-readiness signals measured above and queries all four
assistants for your business by name, with no signup and a result in about a
minute.
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