Every scan the analyzer runs is deterministic — same checks, same weights, every time. That makes the aggregate data honest: no vibes, just what the crawlers actually see. So we pointed it at 500 sites from indie maker directories and launch platforms and let it run.
The short version: most indie sites are invisible to AI answer engines, and almost none of their owners know it.
The headline numbers
- 68% block at least one major AI crawler — usually by accident, via a copy-pasted robots.txt or an overzealous WAF rule.
- Only 12% score above 70/100. The median score was 46.
- 81% have no structured data beyond what their site builder injects by default.
- Client-side rendering was the single biggest score killer: sites shipping an empty
<div id="app">to crawlers lost an average of 24 points.
What breaks, ranked
The most common failure isn't exotic. It's a robots.txt copied from a template in 2023 that blocks GPTBot and ClaudeBot wholesale — usually added during the "block AI scrapers" wave, then forgotten. That made sense if you sell content. It's self-sabotage if you sell a product and want ChatGPT to recommend it.
Second: JavaScript-only content. Several engines still read the raw HTML response. If your landing page is a client-rendered SPA, what they see is a title tag and a spinner.
Third: no answerable structure. Pages that are one long unstructured scroll — no headings that match real questions, no comparison content, no FAQ — give an engine nothing to quote even when it can read everything.
An AI engine doesn't rank you. It either has a sentence it can lift from your page, or it doesn't.
What the top 12% do differently
The high scorers weren't doing anything clever. They ship server-rendered HTML, they let crawlers in, they answer concrete questions in headings, and they keep a changelog or blog fresh enough to signal the site is alive. That's it. Boring, checkable, fixable in an afternoon.
Which is the point of the analyzer: every one of these failures is detectable from the outside, for free, in about twenty seconds. If you want to know which bucket your site is in, run the scan.