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 12% of the sites we audited publish FAQ schema. The top-scoring site, squarespace.com at 98/100, is one of the few that does. The format that most improves your odds of being cited is sitting unused on almost every site.

A few are quietly shutting AI crawlers out

None of the sites that returned a complete audit block every AI answer engine — but 5%still disallow at least one AI crawler in robots.txt, often unintentionally: a leftover from a generic rule written for a pre-AI web. Even one blocked search crawler quietly removes you from that engine's answers.

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

30% of the sample published no structured data at all, and 40% 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.