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Local Business AI Search Visibility Report 2026

What AI assistants find when they read 459 dentist and law firm websites across 7 US cities. Checked in September 2026; every number below comes from our own crawl.

Key findings

  1. The problem is not blocking. It is having nothing to cite.

    Only 6.1% of sites block an AI crawler. But 53.6% never tell AI who they are with a business entity, and 56.2% have no question-and-answer content, the passages assistants quote most.

  2. llms.txt is almost nowhere.

    71% of sites have no llms.txt, the plain-text summary AI models read to understand a site. It takes under an hour to write.

  3. Dentists trail law firms.

    Dental practices average 66.7 against 69.7 for law firms, and block AI crawlers 2.5 times as often (8.4% vs 3.3%).

  4. Where you are matters.

    Denver leads with an average of 74.6. San Antonio is last at 60.3, a 14-point gap. Only 28 of 459 sites (6.1%) score a perfect 100.

What's missing, check by check

SignalSites failing
No llms.txt file71%
No question-and-answer content56.2%
No LocalBusiness or Organization entity53.6%
Missing or multiple H1, too few H2s43.6%
Title or meta description missing or thin26.8%
No JSON-LD structured data at all25.5%
No Open Graph tags24.4%
No sitemap15.5%
Under 1,500 characters of visible text10.7%
Blocks at least one major AI crawler in robots.txt6.1%

Dentists vs law firms

Dentists (249)Law firms (210)
Average score66.769.7
No llms.txt76.3%64.8%
No business entity57.4%49%
No Q&A content57%55.2%
No structured data24.9%26.2%
Block an AI crawler8.4%3.3%

By city

CitySitesAverageBlock an AI crawlerRankings
Denver, CO5274.65.8%Dentists · Law Firms
Austin, TX62714.8%Dentists · Law Firms
Atlanta, GA6470.26.3%Dentists · Law Firms
Dallas, TX9169.36.6%Dentists · Law Firms
Phoenix, AZ8165.87.4%Dentists · Law Firms
Seattle, WA7064.45.7%Dentists · Law Firms
San Antonio, TX3960.35.1%Dentists · Law Firms

How we measured

We took dentist and law firm listings with a website from public business directories in Denver, Austin, Atlanta, Dallas, Phoenix, Seattle, San Antonio. Each homepage and robots.txt was checked automatically against ten signals that decide whether AI assistants can read and cite a site, weighted toward crawler access and structured data. We excluded unreachable sites, directory placeholder microsites and national firms. The sample reflects businesses listed in those directories, not every business in each city, and checks the homepage only. Data is published under CC BY 4.0; cite "Citable, Local Business AI Search Visibility Report 2026".

Questions

How many local business websites have an llms.txt file?

29% of the 459 dentist and law firm websites we checked in September 2026 had one. 71% did not.

Do local businesses block AI crawlers?

Few do. 6.1% block at least one of GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot or Google-Extended. The more common problem is having nothing AI can cite: 56.2% have no question-and-answer content and 53.6% declare no business entity.

Which city scored highest for AI search visibility?

Denver, CO averaged 74.6/100. San Antonio, TX scored lowest at 60.3/100.

How was the score measured?

Each homepage and robots.txt was checked automatically against ten signals: AI crawler access, llms.txt, JSON-LD structured data, a business entity, Q&A content, heading structure, title and description, text depth, sitemap and Open Graph tags. Scores run 0 to 100.

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