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ResearchBy Ronnie Huss

Only six of 6,078 Birmingham business websites are fully ready for AI to recommend. A Birmingham-built company is pledging over £1 million of free support to change that.

BIRMINGHAM, 12 November 2026. SearchScore, the Birmingham-built company that scores websites for how ready they are to be recommended by AI tools such as ChatGPT, today opens the first round of the Birmingham Business Growth Initiative: a free 90-day programme worth £1,170 for each of 1,000 Birmingham businesses. The first round is open from 12 to 30 November, with limited places available, to businesses with a Birmingham (B) postcode and a working website, one place per business.

The programme follows SearchScore's AI Visibility Report: Birmingham 2026, which checked 6,078 Birmingham business websites one by one. Six are fully ready for AI to recommend. The city's average score is 54.9 out of 100, and nine in ten websites score under 70.

More and more customers start by asking ChatGPT, Gemini or Google's AI to find them a plumber in Kings Heath or a dentist in Harborne. The AI reads business websites and suggests two or three names. The report shows that Birmingham's websites let AI in, with 96% readable by ChatGPT, but give it little to go on: 3,491 businesses (57%) have no questions-and-answers section, no fact or figure AI could repeat, and no guide file for AI tools. Only 151 businesses in the whole city, 2.5%, put a specific number such as years in business or customers served on their homepage.

The six businesses AI is ready to recommend are Hutcheon Law (82.4), Woodcock Law (81.3), Tax Care Accountants (81.1), Centrick (81.0), Claim Time Solicitors (80.5) and WOW Gutters (80.3). None is a chain, a tech firm or a household name.

The report also finds:

  • The city centre is ahead and Southside is behind. Businesses around Colmore Row (B3) average 59.1; in Southside and Digbeth (B5) the average is 50.6 and one in five score under 40.
  • Restaurants, hotels and schools are the least ready. A quarter of the city's 99 hotels score under 40. Birmingham's 81 school websites average 48.8, and not one scores 70 or more.
  • Being good on Google does not mean being good on AI. 1,390 businesses score 70 or more for ordinary Google search; 875 of them still score under 70 for AI.
  • 229 businesses have a setting that blocks OpenAI's crawler from learning from their website, most without knowing it.

Ronnie Huss, founder of SearchScore, said: "I live in Birmingham and I think it's one of the best places in the country to build a business. More customers now start by asking AI who to call, and most local businesses have no idea whether they're the name it gives. I want Birmingham's businesses to be the ones that get recommended."

Each business on the programme receives a 300+ point website review, a prioritised fix list, two AI Visibility Playbooks showing who AI recommends instead of them and why, and three calls with a specialist over 90 days, including a day-60 progress review. There is no payment and no obligation to buy anything. SearchScore will measure Birmingham again and publish what has moved.

The initiative is funded and run by SearchScore. It is not an endorsement by Birmingham City Council, the mayor's office or any media organisation.

Businesses can pre-register at searchscore.io/birmingham. The full report, with every area and type of business, is at searchscore.io/savi-report/birmingham-2026/.

ENDS

Notes to editors

  • Method: every business's live website was checked in October 2026 with the same version of SearchScore's scoring, the same 300+ checks it uses for AI, Google and conversion, with the AI checks turned into a score out of 100 and a separate score for ordinary Google search. Businesses came from Google business listings across 27 types of local business and from OpenStreetMap. National chains, NHS sites and libraries were left out, as were 865 marketing agencies and web designers. The 1,461 websites that could not be checked are left out, not counted as zero.
  • The score measures how ready a website is to be recommended by AI. Whether AI is recommending a business today is measured separately.
  • Only the six fully ready businesses are named. Everyone else stays anonymous.
  • SearchScore is a trading name of The Product Specialists Ltd and is built in Birmingham.
  • Interviews, area and sector data cuts, and the founder are available. Contact: [email protected].

AI Visibility Report: Birmingham 2026 →