Audit Reveals Major Websites Poorly Prepared for AI Search Crawlers
A scored audit of prominent websites assessed their readiness for AI-driven search tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity across three technical criteria: presence of an llms.txt file, AI crawler permissions in robots.txt, and a working sitemap. Sites were graded on a 0–100 scale, with WordPress.org scoring 88 and Anthropic's documentation scoring 85, while The Irish Times scored just 33. The Irish Times had no llms.txt file and explicitly blocked OpenAI's GPTBot in its robots.txt, effectively making it invisible to some of the fastest-growing AI answer engines. The audit highlights that many sites may be inadvertently blocking AI crawlers due to blanket rules added years ago, undermining their own visibility strategies. The author notes that remedying these gaps typically requires only a day's work and has built a tool to run bulk checks at roughly $5 per 1,000 URLs.
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