AI Visibility Index: how often small businesses appear in AI answers | Website Auditor
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The AI Visibility Study
Search is becoming an answer, not just a list of links. This is an ongoing<br>measurement of how often real small and mid-sized businesses are named when<br>an AI assistant answers a buying-intent question about their category, and of<br>what their own websites do or fail to do to earn that mention.
Built from 531 website audits across<br>458 domains and 38 detected sectors.<br>The corpus runs to 2026-08-02, the date of its most recent audit.<br>Free to cite and quote with attribution.
94.8%<br>of audited sites are never named in an AI answer
1.9%<br>of 5,978 assistant answers named the business asked about
8.9%<br>block at least one AI crawler in robots.txt
What the AI Visibility Index measures
The Index tracks two things separately, because "being visible to AI" is<br>really two problems with two different causes.
Answer presence
A customer asks an assistant for the best provider of a category in a place,<br>and the assistant answers with a handful of names. This pillar asks whether<br>the audited business is one of those names. Every audited business is queried<br>against ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, and each answer is matched<br>against the audited business.
Machine readability
This pillar is what an assistant's crawler finds on arrival: whether<br>robots.txt lets it in, whether the site publishes a sitemap, whether the<br>homepage states the business's identity and location in machine-readable<br>form. Every one of these signals is first-party, read by our own crawler<br>directly from the site.
Presence is the outcome; readability is the input under a site owner's control.<br>A site can be perfectly marked up and still go unnamed, which is why both are<br>published side by side rather than combined into a single score. The signals<br>come from the same free scan anyone can run on their own site.
Key findings
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.
The data
Share of answers naming the audited business
2026-07-23 to 2026-08-02 •<br>193 sites •<br>5,978 answers
Gemini
2.9%<br>8 of 193 sites
ChatGPT
1.7%<br>5 of 193 sites
Claude
1.6%<br>5 of 193 sites
Perplexity
1.6%<br>8 of 193 sites
Every assistant was asked the same questions about the same businesses on the<br>same days, so the differences below are differences between assistants.<br>ChatGPT answered 1,352 of its 1,544 queries;<br>the 192 that failed at the provider are excluded from<br>its denominator rather than counted as absences.
AI crawlers blocked in robots.txt
Share of 436 audited sites disallowing each user-agent
CCBot
8.7%<br>38 sites - training
GPTBot
8.7%<br>38 sites - training
Bytespider
8.5%<br>37 sites - training
ClaudeBot
8.3%<br>36 sites - training
Google-Extended
8.3%<br>36 sites - training
anthropic-ai
1.4%<br>6 sites - training
PerplexityBot
1.1%<br>5 sites - retrieval
ChatGPT-User
0.9%<br>4 sites - retrieval
OAI-SearchBot
0.9%<br>4 sites - retrieval
Perplexity-User
0.7%<br>3 sites - retrieval
Training crawlers harvest pages to build models; retrieval agents fetch a page<br>in response to a live question. Blocking the first costs a site nothing in<br>today's answers. Blocking the second makes the...