Only 8.9% of sites block AI crawlers, but 94.8% are never cited in AI answers
A recent study found that only 8.9% of websites block AI crawlers, while 94.8% are never cited in AI answers. The study, which audited 683 websites across 602 domains, also found that 95.3% of audited sites never surface in an AI answer. The findings suggest that many websites are not optimized for AI visibility, which can impact their online presence and credibility.
- ▪Only 8.9% of websites block AI crawlers, with 58 sites blocking GPTBot and 56 sites blocking ClaudeBot.
- ▪94.8% of websites are never cited in AI answers, with only 16 of 339 sites being named at least once across 10,650 assistant answers.
- ▪52.5% of websites publish schema.org structured data, with 22.7% publishing LocalBusiness schema.
Hacker News (AI / LLM) files mainly under ai. We currently carry 4,376 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Website Auditor |
| Canonical URL | https://website-auditor.io/ai-visibility-index |
| Publication time | Sun, 02 Aug 2026 11:53:52 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-02T12:00:46.272Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-02T12:00:46.566Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | cHlIRr0aktLY |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
The AI Visibility Study Search is becoming an answer, not just a list of links. This is an ongoing measurement of how often real small and mid-sized businesses are named when an AI assistant answers a buying-intent question about their category, and of what their own websites do or fail to do to earn that mention. Built from 683 website audits across 602 domains and 40 detected sectors. The corpus runs to 2026-08-05, the date of its most recent audit. Free to cite and quote with attribution.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Website Auditor.
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