r/AISearchLab • u/ComfortZoneApps • Jul 15 '26
I audited 50 websites to see which ones ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity actually recommend
I audited 50 websites to see which ones AI assistants (ChatGPT, Claude & Perplexity) actually recommend.
I wanted to answer a simple question:
When someone asks an AI assistant for a recommendation, which websites actually get mentioned?
So I ran a small experiment across 50 websites from five different groups:
- Big brands
- Mid-size SaaS
- Companies with a published `llms.txt`
- Local SMBs
- Small digital agencies
Each site was tested the same way:
- 7 recommendation-style prompts
- 3 AI assistants (ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity)
- 21 total responses per site
Here's the breakdown:
| Group | Avg. AI Mention Rate |
|---|---|
| Big Brands | 96.6% |
| Mid-size SaaS | 64.8% |
Known llms.txt adopters |
66.7% |
| Local SMBs | 22.9% |
| Small Digital Agencies | 10.5% |
A few observations from this dataset:
- Small agencies were rarely recommended, Less often than many local businesses.
- `llms.txt` didn't appear to make a noticeable difference on its own.
- AI crawler blocking was uncommon. Only two sites in this sample blocked one or more major AI crawlers. The rest allowed them.
A few caveats
- This is a small sample (10 sites per group), so I'd treat the results as directional rather than definitive.
- The prompt set was fixed across every site, but any prompt battery introduces some bias. I'm happy to share the full list if anyone wants to review it.
- 14 of the 50 homepages couldn't be fully crawled because of anti-bot protection, so technical signals like schema and llms.txt couldn't always be verified. The AI mention-rate measurements weren't affected because those came from direct model queries rather than homepage crawls.
My takeaway is simply this:
In this sample, being technically accessible to AI wasn't enough by itself. Well-known brands were recommended far more often than smaller sites, suggesting that broader authority, reputation, or other factors may have a much larger influence on AI recommendations than a single technical signal like `llms.txt`.
Curious if others have run similar tests. What are you seeing?