We Scanned 20 Tech Giants for AI-Readiness – The Results Might Surprise You

As AI search engines reshape how users discover content, a new question is emerging for SEO professionals: how ready is your website for AI agents?

While traditional SEO focuses on ranking in Google’s blue links, AI-powered search tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude process websites very differently. They look for structured data, clean content hierarchies, and explicit machine-readable signals — things that most sites haven’t optimized for.

We built an AEO (Agent Engine Optimization) checker that scores any website’s AI-readiness across 7 dimensions, out of 110 points. Then we pointed it at 20 of the biggest names in tech. The results reveal a massive gap between the companies building AI and the ones preparing for it.

THE SCORING METHODOLOGY

Our checker evaluates seven key signals:

1. llms.txt: A proposed standard (similar to robots.txt) that tells AI models what content to prioritize.
2. robots.txt AI directives — Whether sites explicitly allow or block AI crawlers like GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot.
3. Structured data (JSON-LD) — Schema.org markup that gives AI parsers rich context about the page.
4. Open Graph / meta tags — Proper titles, descriptions, and social metadata that AI uses for summarization.
5. Content structure — Heading hierarchy, semantic HTML, and logical content flow.
6. FAQ schema — FAQPage or HowTo schema that AI tools use to extract direct answers.
7. Accessibility & technical — Page performance, mobile-friendliness, and semantic landmarks.

Each area is scored and weighted, with a maximum total of 110.

THE RESULTS

Average score: 57.4 out of 110.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. Developer tools lead, enterprise lags.

The top of the list is dominated by developer-focused companies: Sentry, Linear, Shopify, Datadog, Stripe. These companies have engineering teams that stay close to emerging standards and adopt them early. Enterprise tools like Atlassian and HashiCorp – despite having massive SEO operations – haven’t prioritized AI-readiness.

2. The companies building AI don’t optimize for it.

The most ironic finding: OpenAI scores 23/110 (Poor) and Anthropic scores 49/110 (Needs Work). The companies powering the AI revolution haven’t made their own sites AI-readable.

3. llms.txt is the single biggest differentiator.

Sentry’s score of 88 is largely driven by their llms.txt implementation. David Cramer, Sentry’s co-founder, recently wrote about optimizing content for AI agents, confirming that they actively invest in agent-readability. Sites without llms.txt typically plateau around 50-70 points regardless of how good their traditional SEO is.

4. Good SEO does not equal good AEO.

HubSpot has arguably the strongest content marketing operation in SaaS, with thousands of ranking pages. Yet they score 51/110. Traditional SEO strength doesn’t automatically translate to AI-readiness. The signals AI agents look for — llms.txt, explicit AI crawler permissions, clean structured data — are a different optimization layer entirely.

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR SEO PROFESSIONALS

AI-powered search is no longer a fringe concern. ChatGPT processes over 37.5 million queries per day, and users increasingly treat AI chatbots as their first search step. If your site isn’t optimized for these agents, you’re invisible in a growing channel.

The good news: most of the optimization work overlaps with existing SEO best practices. Structured data, clean heading hierarchies, and comprehensive meta tags benefit both Google and AI agents. The new additions – llms.txt, AI crawler directives – take minutes to implement.

The companies that act now will have a head start. As our data shows, even the biggest tech companies haven’t figured this out yet.

TRY IT YOURSELF

You can scan any website for free with the AEO Checker – unlimited scans, no signup required.