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Benchmark report

The State of AI Visibility

We audited 537 B2B websites for how visible, structured, and citable they are to AI answer engines. The median scores 75/100. Here is where the average site wins, where it falls short, and what it means for being cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.

Live data, refreshed weekly · · Methodology

537

B2B sites analyzed

75/100

Median AI-readiness score

50–91

Score range

86/100

Top-decile threshold (p90)

Quotable, anchored, datestamped

Key findings

Every figure below is computed from the live dataset. Each card carries its own anchor and sample size, and the copy button gives you a ready-to-paste citation.

75/100

The median B2B site scores 75/100 for AI readiness; entry to the top decile starts at 86.

Scored across crawl access, structured data, extractability, answerability, entity clarity, trust, freshness, and off-site presence.

n=537 sites ·

49/100

Structured Data is the weakest layer: the average site scores 49/100, and a quarter of sites score 5 or below.

This is the layer that most directly decides whether an AI engine can parse and cite you correctly.

n=537 sites ·

68–82

Half of all audited sites land between 68 and 82: the middle of the field is mediocre together.

Clearing the pack does not require excellence; it requires fixing what most sites leave broken.

n=537 sites ·

98/100

Bot Access & Control Plane is effectively solved, averaging 98/100. Being fetchable no longer differentiates; being citable does.

Differentiation has moved down the stack, from access to structure and evidence.

n=537 sites ·

+32

The top 10% pull away hardest on content freshness & authority: 32 points between the median site (50) and the 90th percentile (82).

If you want to know what the best sites do differently, start here.

n=537 sites ·

91/100

No audited site scores 100. The best in the sample reaches 91; every site still fails something.

AI readiness is a maintained property, not a finished project.

n=537 sites ·

Overall score distribution

The shape of the field

The middle half of the field sits in the 6882 band around a median of 75. The tail above 86 is where AI engines find sites they can parse, verify, and cite without guesswork.

50MIN68P2575MEDIAN82P7586P9091MAX

By audit dimension, weakest first

Where sites win and lose

Most sites have the basics covered: bot access & control plane averages 98/100. The gap is in the machine-readable layer: structured data averages just 49/100. Each bar shows the middle half of the field (band), the median (tick), and the 90th percentile (dot).

Structured Data

avg 49

p25 5 · median 68 · p75 77 · p90 82

The machine-readable layer. JSON-LD tells an engine who you are, what you sell, and which page answers what. The bottom quartile ships essentially none of it, which makes correct citation a coin flip.

Content Freshness & Authority

avg 60

p25 50 · median 50 · p75 70 · p90 82

Datestamps, bylines, and article schema. Engines discount undated, unattributed content, and half the field shows almost no freshness signals at all. This is also where the top decile separates hardest.

Entity Clarity

avg 68

p25 63 · median 63 · p75 75 · p90 78

Whether a machine can tell who you are: organization schema, the brand name in title and H1, linked profiles. Ambiguity here is how engines mix you up with a competitor.

Trust & Security

avg 73

p25 68 · median 76 · p75 82 · p90 83

About, contact, privacy and terms pages, security headers, no exposed secrets. Engines weigh accountability signals when deciding what is safe to recommend.

Off-site Presence & Mentions

avg 78

p25 83 · median 83 · p75 92 · p90 100

What the rest of the web says about you: third-party mentions, source diversity, authority, recency. The hardest dimension to fake, and a large separator at the top of the field.

Content Answerability

avg 79

p25 75 · median 83 · p75 88 · p90 88

Question-shaped headings, definitions, lists, and concrete data points an engine can lift verbatim. Decent on average; the gap between adequate and quotable is where citations are won.

HTML Extractability & Main Content Clarity

avg 84

p25 79 · median 85 · p75 88 · p90 94

Clean titles, a single H1, sane text-to-markup ratio, alt text. Mostly competent across the field; failures here are self-inflicted and cheap to fix.

Fetch, Render, and URL Integrity

avg 88

p25 70 · median 100 · p75 100 · p90 100

HTTPS, fast responses, no redirect chains, and content that exists without running JavaScript. The median site passes outright; the bottom quartile pays a steep tax, often for JS-only rendering.

Bot Access & Control Plane

avg 98

p25 100 · median 100 · p75 100 · p90 100

robots.txt, sitemaps, and AI-crawler policy. Effectively solved: nearly everyone lets the engines in. Letting them in is not the same as giving them something to cite.

Gap between the median site and the 90th percentile

What separates the top decile

Where the spread between the median and the 90th percentile is widest, the best sites are doing something the rest are not. Where it is narrow, the dimension is either solved or uniformly neglected.

DimensionMedianp90Gap
Content Freshness & Authority5082+32
Off-site Presence & Mentions83100+17
Entity Clarity6378+15
Structured Data6882+14
HTML Extractability & Main Content Clarity8594+9
Trust & Security7683+7
Content Answerability8388+5
Fetch, Render, and URL Integrity100100+0
Bot Access & Control Plane100100+0

How the data is collected

Methodology

Figures aggregate automated AI-readiness audits of 537 public B2B websites, scored 0–100 across nine dimensions covering crawl access, structured data, extractability, answerability, entity clarity, trust, freshness, and off-site presence. Each domain contributes its most recent completed audit inside a 365-day window. The sample is self-selected: these are sites whose teams chose to run an audit, which likely skews it toward the AI-aware end of the market. Data as of .

The full scoring rubric, including every check, weight, and known limitation, is public: how the audit scores sites. The live, interactive view and the per-brand leaderboard live in the audit app: app.nyman.media/insights.