Most leading software brands aren't ready for AI search

The format AI loves most is the one nobody uses

AI assistants are disproportionately likely to quote content shaped as questions and answers — it maps directly onto how people prompt them. Yet just 5% of the sites we audited publish FAQ schema. The lone exception, squarespace.com, also topped the study at 95/100. The format that most improves your odds of being cited is sitting unused on almost every site.

Some giants are invisible by their own hand

The most surprising finding: calendly.com and slack.com block every major AI answer engine in their robots.txt. No matter how good their content is, ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, and Claude simply cannot read it. In total, 14% of sites block at least one AI crawler — often unintentionally, a leftover from a generic robots rule written for a pre-AI web.

Structured data is still optional — and it shouldn't be

29% of the sample published no structured data at all, and 43% had no Organization markup to anchor their identity. These are the machine-readable facts AI relies on to know who you are and what it can safely quote. Without them, even a well-known brand becomes a guess.