Original research

The State of LLM Visibility

We ran LLCrawler's free audit on 111 real websites and aggregated the results. This is what AI readiness looks like across the web right now — average scores, the most common failures, and how few sites have the basics in place.

70/100
Average visibility score
12%
Sites scoring below 50
37%
Sites with no llms.txt
111
Sites analyzed

Why this matters

25%

Projected drop in traditional search volume by 2026 as users shift queries to AI assistants. If buyers ask ChatGPT instead of Google, being citable is the new being rankable.

Gartner (2024)
~900M

Weekly active users on ChatGPT by early 2026 — a discovery channel that barely existed two years ago. The sites AI cites are the ones it can read and trust.

TechCrunch (2026)

How sites score

Critical (0–49) — mostly invisible to AI 12% (13)
Needs work (50–79) — partially readable 52% (58)
AI-ready (80–100) — findable and citable 36% (40)

The most common issues we find

Share of audited sites where each issue showed up at least once.

Issue Severity % of sites
No BreadcrumbList or SiteLinksSearchBox Warning 83%
No /llms-full.txt file found Warning 70%
No review platform links Warning 62%
No first-party expertise language Warning 58%
No citations or references found Warning 55%
No credential or expertise signals Warning 52%
No detectable FAQ section Warning 52%
No publication or update date found Critical 47%

Methodology

Figures are aggregated from 111 completed LLCrawler audits of public websites. Each audit crawls the homepage plus up to nine internal pages and scores six categories: structured data, content structure, meta and social tags, performance, AI readiness (llms.txt, robots.txt directives, JavaScript dependency), and sitemap. Issues are counted once per site. Numbers update as more sites are analyzed.

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