Original research · June 2026
We tested 23 companies that sell AI visibility. Most fail their own test.
We ran the same AI-readability checks these companies sell on their own websites. The gap between what the industry preaches and what it practices is the whole story. All figures below are measured, and the cohort is anonymized.
of the 23 companies we tested publish no llms.txt, the single file that tells AI tools who a business is. They sell AI visibility. Not one had the most basic piece of it in place.
Key findings
Five things the data shows.
- 01
Every single company we tested (100%) publishes no llms.txt, the plain-text fact sheet that tells AI tools who the business is.
- 02
96% do not explicitly invite the AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot) that read the web for ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity.
- 03
96% carry no business schema, the structured data that lets AI understand what they do.
- 04
The median score was 31 out of 100. The highest any company reached was 69. None scored above 70.
- 05
8 of the 23 passed none of the six AI-readability fundamentals at all.
The distribution
23 companies, scored out of 100.
Each bar is one anonymized company, highest to lowest. The cluster sits low. The median is 31, the mean is 34.5, and nothing clears 70.
How few do the basics
Share of companies that pass each AI-readability check.
Each bar is how many of the 23 actually pass. The shorter the bar, the fewer do it. Not one publishes an llms.txt.
Methodology
How we ran this, in plain terms.
We took 23 companies that publicly sell AI visibility, GEO, or answer engine optimization services and tools (12 agencies and 11 software tools), and ran each one through the same automated AI-readability checks in June 2026.
Every check is an externally verifiable fact, not an opinion: whether a site serves an llms.txt file, whether its robots.txt invites the named AI crawlers, whether its pages carry structured data, whether it serves plain-text mirrors, whether the homepage has an FAQ block, and whether the sitemap is current. We saved the raw evidence for every site.
This is the fast automated read, the same diagnostic we offer as a free score, not the deeper full audit we run for clients. We report it the same way for every company, and we hold our own site to it too.
We hold ourselves to the same rules
We practice what we measure.
Altaway is built on the same ten-rule Discovery Protocol we audit your site against. The AI-readability fundamentals that every one of these 23 companies missed, an llms.txt, AI-crawler access, business schema, plain-text mirrors, a homepage FAQ, are all in place on this site. We measure ourselves on the record, and re-check it every quarter. Do not take our word for it. See how AI visibility works.
Where does your site stand?
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