We scanned 148 businesses in 20 cities. Only 16% sign their work

Last reviewed 19 October 2026.

We scanned 148 businesses across 20 cities in seven countries with our own extractability and crawler-access tools. Structured data is nearly universal. Heading architecture is close behind. And fewer than one site in six tells you who wrote the page or when.

That gap holds everywhere. It is not a developing-market problem or a small-business problem. New York, London and Sydney, three of the most expensive agency markets in the world, all sit at or below 17%.

How do local business websites score on AI readiness?

Median extractability across the whole sample was 68 out of 100, well above the 45 median we recorded across 243 top global websites in our earlier study. These are professional service businesses (agencies, developers, clinics, hotels, jewellers) and they build better than the web average.

Which cities sign their work?

Of the eight checks charted above, six pass on most sites. A direct answer near the top passes on 41.2%. Attribution, a named author and publish dates, does not come close at 16.2%.

Six cities recorded zero. Not one sampled site in Lucknow, Indore, Noida, Bhopal, Chandigarh or Dubai declares both an author and publish dates.

And the ranking runs against expectation. The top four markets on attribution are all Indian. Chennai at 43% and Bengaluru at 38% beat New York, London, Sydney and Dubai, markets with far higher median scores and vastly larger budgets.

Do Indian or international businesses score better?

International markets lead on median score by nine points. On attribution they are practically identical: 15.6% against 16.5%. Whatever drives the score gap, it is not the willingness to sign your work. Nobody does that anywhere.

Do business websites open with a direct answer?

Mostly not. Only 41.2% of sites open with a paragraph between 25 and 90 words: long enough to contain an answer, short enough for a model to lift whole. This is the highest-weighted check in our model, because it determines whether extraction is possible before anything else is assessed.

Only two markets clear 60%: Kolkata at 67% and New York at 63%. Fourteen of twenty sit below half.

What do these businesses already do well?

It is worth being clear about what these businesses do well, because the picture is not one of general neglect. 90.5% use three or more H2 sections. 85.1% carry structured data, and in New York, London, Sydney and Singapore that figure is 100%. 75% include lists or tables. These are competent, well-built websites.

The technical layer is done. The editorial layer is not.

Do local businesses block AI crawlers?

Rarely. Nine of 148 sites block at least one AI crawler. Twenty-two name AI user-agents explicitly in robots.txt without blocking them. Pune had the highest deliberate engagement, with three of nine sites naming crawlers and two blocking.

That is a far lower blocking rate than the 20.6% we found among the world’s top 506 domains. Publishers block. Professional service businesses mostly do not: they want the visibility.

Why does author and date attribution matter for AI search?

Retrieval systems that cite prefer content they can attribute. A named author and a publish date are the cheapest signals available: a template change, not a strategy. They cost nothing and almost nobody has claimed them.

If you run a professional services business, this is the rare case where the competitive gap is genuinely trivial to close. Add a byline. Add a date. Open with the answer. Sakshi’s write-up, Only 16% of businesses sign their work, covers how to do it.

Can I download the data?

Yes. All 148 rows, with per-check results, opening paragraph length, heading counts and crawler verdicts, released under CC BY 4.0.

Per-city breakdowns are published on each city page, for example Chennai, London and Dubai.

How do I check my own site?

Run the AI Answer Extractability Checker. If you pass the author-and-dates check, you are already ahead of 84% of the professional service businesses we measured across seven countries.

Sources and standards

The checks in this study are grounded in published documentation rather than our own opinion. Structured data definitions follow Schema.org. Crawler directive parsing follows the Robots Exclusion Protocol as specified in RFC 9309. Heading and document-outline expectations follow the HTML Living Standard, and general crawling and indexing guidance follows Google Search Central.

Questions about this study