What 858,000 Websites Tell Us About AI Search Visibility

A digital marketing and website building platform Duda has just published data from 858,000 live websites, tracking how AI search engines - ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini - crawl and reference business websites in real time.

The findings are worth reading carefully. Not because the headline numbers are surprising, but because the detail reveals something that cuts through a lot of the noise around AI and search: the signals that make a website visible to AI engines are largely the same signals that have always made a website rank well.

That matters if you own a business and you are trying to make sense of what AI-generated search results actually mean for you in practical terms.

What AI search visibility actually means

When someone types a question into ChatGPT or Perplexity and gets an answer back, that answer came from somewhere. Either the AI was trained on content from a website and retained it, or it crawled that site in real time to pull the most current answer. Either way, whether your business is mentioned in that answer depends on whether the AI can read and understand your website at all.

That is what AI search visibility means. It is not about algorithm updates or ranking positions in the traditional sense. It is about whether an AI engine can crawl your website, understand what your business does, where you are located, and what questions you can answer - and then reference that information when a relevant query comes in.

The data, published by Duda, shows that 59% of the 858,000 sites they analysed were actively being crawled by AI engines in February 2026. Among active sites with real traffic, that figure rises to 71.8%.

What the data actually shows - and what it does not

The headline from the report is that AI-crawled sites generate 3.2x more human traffic, 2.7x more form submissions, and 2.5x more click-to-call events than sites that are not being crawled.

Before drawing conclusions from those multipliers, it is worth being precise about what the data shows and what it does not.

This is a correlation, not a proof of cause. Better-built websites with more structured, consistent content get crawled by AI engines more frequently - and those same websites also perform better on every other metric. The AI crawl is not producing the leads. The quality of the underlying website is producing both outcomes simultaneously.

That distinction changes what you should actually do. You do not need a new product or a specialist service to improve AI crawlability. You need a website that is structured clearly, has consistent and verifiable business information, and contains enough relevant content for an AI engine to understand what you do and who you serve.

The signals that drive AI visibility are already your SEO foundations

The report breaks down which website features correlate most strongly with AI crawler activity. The list should look familiar to anyone who has invested in proper search visibility.

Local schema markup lifts AI crawl rates by 17 percentage points. Schema is structured data - a machine-readable summary of your business embedded in your site's code. It tells search engines and AI engines your business name, address, phone, service area, opening hours, and type of business. It is not new technology. It is simply missing from most websites.

Google Business Profile - properly set up, current, and connected to your website - pushes crawl rates to 92.8%. A maintained GBP signals to AI engines that your business is real, verified, and active.

Reviews presence on the website lifts crawl rates to 89.8%. Third-party social proof, embedded and readable, reinforces the credibility signals AI engines use to assess whether a source is worth referencing.

Content depth is significant in a way that rewards quality over quantity. Sites with 50 or more published blog posts receive 33 times more AI crawler visits than sites with no blog at all. Sites with 6 to 20 posts sit at an 80.2% crawl rate. That is not an argument for publishing content for its own sake. It is an argument for publishing content that answers the specific questions your prospective clients are actually asking before they pick up the phone.

None of these are new ideas. All of them are things that good SEO practice has recommended for years. The difference now is that AI engines are applying the same criteria, and the gap between sites that have this right and sites that do not is compounding.

Why real estate sites are already ahead - and where the gap still exists

Among the seven local business categories in the dataset, real estate sites have the highest AI crawl rate at 85%. They also lead on local schema adoption at 53.8% and blog content depth at 66.5%.

The reasons are structural. Real estate websites have historically needed rich, structured data - property listings with addresses, locations, prices, availability. That data hygiene habit, applied to the main business website rather than just the listings, is what gives the sector an advantage in AI visibility.

The implication is not that nothing needs to be done. It is that the gap between a well-maintained real estate website and a neglected one is now widening faster. The well-maintained site is being referenced by AI engines in addition to appearing in traditional search results. The neglected one is being passed over on both channels simultaneously.

If you are a property professional and your website does not have local schema, is not connected to your Google Business Profile, or has not had its content updated in several months, you are falling behind your own sector's baseline - not just a theoretical best practice.

The EMEA gap is worth paying attention to

One of the more telling figures in the data is regional. North American sites have an 84.2% AI crawl rate. EMEA sits at 37%.

The report does not explain why. The most likely combination of factors is lower structured data adoption, less active Google Business Profile maintenance, and thinner content depth among European sites generally. Whether AI platforms also spend more time on English-language North American content regardless of site quality is a question the data does not fully resolve.



What it does suggest is an early-mover opportunity. For businesses based in the UK and Europe, the AI visibility gap in this region is wide enough that a well-structured website - complete local schema, active GBP, content that answers real client questions - can get measurably ahead of competitors who have not yet treated this as a priority.

What to prioritise based on this data

If you want to act on this rather than just read it, these are the practical steps in order of impact.

Audit your local schema. If your website does not have LocalBusiness schema markup with complete fields - name, address, phone, service area, business type, opening hours - that is the highest-leverage technical fix available to most businesses right now.

Verify your Google Business Profile is current and connected. This is free. The data suggests it is one of the strongest AI crawlability signals available, and it takes an afternoon to get right.

Review your content depth - not word count, depth. Does your website answer the questions your clients ask before they get in touch? If not, that is the content work worth doing. Short, generic pages are not enough.

Consolidate your review presence. Client reviews displayed on your website in a structured, readable format improve both credibility and AI visibility. If you have reviews on Google but nowhere on your site, that is a straightforward fix.

What this data does not settle

The report was published to support Duda's own product launch - an AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) bundle. That does not make the underlying data wrong, but the commercial framing is present throughout. The report consistently implies that the solution is their bundled features.

The underlying signals - structured data, verified business information, content depth, reviews - are not proprietary to any platform. They are fundamental website hygiene. Any competent developer or SEO professional can implement them without a product purchase.

There is also a question the data raises but does not answer: how much of the EMEA crawl gap is a fixable technical problem, and how much reflects genuine prioritisation by the AI platforms themselves? If crawlers are spending more time on North American content regardless of site quality, the ceiling for UK and European businesses may be different. That is worth monitoring as AI search behaviour develops.

What to do next

If your website is missing local schema, has an outdated Google Business Profile, or has not had its content reviewed in the last 12 months, those are the three places to start.

We carry out technical SEO and structured data audits for business owners who want a clear picture of where they stand. Not a list of problems - a prioritised plan with specific actions and expected outcomes.

You can use our free Local Schema Generator to check and generate your structured data immediately, or get in touch if you want us to review the full picture.