186 of 11,201 marketing agencies have websites AI is ready to recommend

Just 186 of 11,201 marketing agency websites, 1.7%, are ready to be recommended by AI assistants, according to the UK vs US Marketing Agencies 2026 edition of the SearchScore AI Visibility Index, published today. The edition checked 4,811 agencies in the UK and 6,390 in the US, audited between September and October 2026, to see how ready each agency's own website is to be one of the names ChatGPT, Gemini or Google's AI puts forward when a business asks for an agency.

Selling a service they have not finished for themselves

612 agencies pitch AI search or AI visibility on their own homepage. They average 71.4 out of 100 against 62.5 for everyone else, so the specialists are ahead. Even so, only 55 of the 612 (9.0%) reach the AI-Ready band.

"Agencies are paid to make their clients easy to find. Most have not done the same for their own websites," said Ronnie Huss, founder of SearchScore. "What they are missing is small: a few labels that tell AI who they are and why to trust them."

Better at Google than at AI

Across the field, the average SEO score is 68.3, 5.3 points above the average AI-readiness score. 2,654 agencies are strong on Google and not on AI; 185 are the other way round. The door is open: 97% of agencies let ChatGPT's crawler read their site. The table is bare: 14% publish a figure or fact in the format AI lifts to quote.

Six labels sort the field

Six machine-readable labels do most of the work: one that says who the agency is, one for each of its people, FAQ markup, article markup on case studies, an llms.txt file, and one figure written so AI can quote it. Agencies with none of them average 47.7; agencies with all six average 78.8. Not one of the 6,250 agencies with two or fewer is AI-Ready. The difference between the top 10% and the bottom half is labelled information, almost line for line, and none of it depends on the quality of the agency's work.

The cities

Across the two countries, Leeds and Phoenix lead. In the UK, Leeds, Manchester and Sheffield lead, and London, with 915 agencies, averages 60.1. In the US the Sun Belt and Mountain West lead, and the big coastal cities sit below the national average: New York at 63.3, San Francisco at 62.1, Seattle at 61.4.

UK against US

Across everyone checked, US agencies average 4.6 points more than UK agencies. Compare only agencies listed in the same directories in both countries and the gap is 1.1. The UK's deficit is its long tail.

Method

Each website was audited once, in full, between September and October 2026, and scored 0 to 100 for how ready it is to be found, trusted and cited by AI answer engines. Bands: AI-Ready 80 to 100, Strong 70 to 79, Emerging 40 to 69, Low Visibility 20 to 39, Invisible 0 to 19. The method is documented at searchscore.io/methodology/.

All figures, charts and the data file are free to reuse under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence: credit SearchScore and link to the report. Custom cuts by country, city, agency type or platform are available on request.