Original research

The State of LLM Visibility

We ran LLCrawler's free audit on 90 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.

68/100
Average visibility score
12%
Sites scoring below 50
34%
Sites with no llms.txt
90
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% (11)
Needs work (50–79) — partially readable 54% (49)
AI-ready (80–100) — findable and citable 33% (30)

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 80%
No /llms-full.txt file found Warning 68%
No detectable FAQ section Warning 60%
No review platform links Warning 53%
No citations or references found Warning 51%
No first-party expertise language Warning 50%
Low performance score: 31/100 Warning 47%
No credential or expertise signals Warning 46%

Methodology

Figures are aggregated from 90 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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