Almost nothing is ready for AI search. We scored 1,000,000 sites to be sure.
SearchScore publishes SAVI snapshots of website readiness for AI search. The current frozen Q3 global benchmark is 216 of 1,000,000+ sites, or 0.022%, reaching the AI-Ready band. Earlier UK, regional and sector editions were produced under their own published scorer versions. They remain useful historical snapshots, but their percentages are not a trend line and should not be compared as though the measurement system stayed unchanged.
Since the start of 2026 we have published SAVI editions across different populations: global, UK, regional and sector cohorts. The underlying scorer has evolved during that period, so these editions answer the same broad readiness question but are not one fixed-method longitudinal dataset.
Each edition is a snapshot. Read side by side, they show recurring readiness gaps across very different cohorts. They do not, however, prove a change over time or support direct percentage comparisons between editions scored under different versions.
The one number that matters
When someone asks an AI assistant to recommend a business, it puts forward two or three names, not ten. To be one of them, a site has to clear the top band of our 0 to 100 scale, "AI-Ready", which starts at 80. Here is how many websites get there.
The current global benchmark is roughly one AI-Ready site in 4,600. Earlier UK and sector snapshots show similarly large readiness gaps, but they were not all scored under the same version. No single on-site signal should be read as independently earning an AI citation.
What the published snapshots show
These editions cover different populations and were not all scored under the same version. They are useful for seeing recurring readiness gaps, but not for claiming that one sector, place or quarter improved relative to another.
| Scope | SAVI edition | Sites scored | Avg score /100 | AI-Ready |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| International, current | SAVI Q3 2026 | 1,000,000+ | n/a | 0.022% |
| International, historical | Vol 2, Q2 2026 (superseded scoring) | 850,000+ | 34 | 0.2%* |
| * Comparability note: 0.2% is the published Q2 result under the earlier scoring system. The current frozen Q3 headline is 216 of 1,000,000+ sites, or 0.022%. SearchScore reset the benchmark rather than presenting the two as a trend because the scorer and corpus changed. | ||||
| UK, national | UK Edition 2026 | 31,152 | 42.6 | 0% |
| UK, regional | West Midlands 2026 | 12,562 | 45.3 | ~0% |
| UK, sector | Accountants 2026 | 1,038 | 53 | 0.1% |
| UK, sector | Dentists 2026 | 3,399 | 52.8 | 0.1% |
Sources: SearchScore SAVI editions, 2026. Each site is scored across 250+ AI search visibility signals. "AI-Ready" is a score of 80 or higher. City editions (London, Birmingham and Manchester accountants) show the same shape at smaller samples.
Why the world looks worse than the professions (it doesn't)
Read the table too quickly and you might conclude UK accountants and dentists, at 53, are twice as good as the global web at 34. They are not. This is the single most important caveat in the whole benchmark, and it is a lesson in reading data honestly.
The international average is drawn from 1,000,000 sites of every kind, the entire long tail of the web, including abandoned pages, thin listings and sites that were never trying to be found. The UK sector editions are curated cohorts of real, trading professional practices with staffed websites. A higher average there reflects a cleaner population, not superior work. The like-for-like comparison is not the average. It is the ceiling, and the ceiling is the same everywhere: almost nobody clears 80.
The pattern behind the numbers
Look under every edition and the same two-part story repeats, almost word for word.
The door is open. In every cohort, the overwhelming majority of sites let the AI in, the crawler directives are fine and the pages are technically reachable. Across editions, "technical basics" is consistently the strongest area we measure, scoring in the mid-70s. Whatever platform businesses build on handles that part for them.
The table is bare. Then, in every cohort, the same sites fail the parts that actually win the recommendation: labelled, structured information an AI can lift, and clear signals of a known, trusted brand. "Structured data" and "brand authority" are the two weakest areas in edition after edition, scoring in the mid-30s. The content exists. It is simply never labelled in a way a machine can read, quote and trust.
That is why the fix is cheaper than it looks. Nobody in this data is losing because their advice is bad or their business is weak. They are losing because their site was built to be read by people and never relabelled for machines, and the relabelling is largely a technical job that can be done once.
What it means for your business
The strategic read is almost optimistic. In a market where 99.8% of sites are not AI-Ready, the bar to stand out is astonishingly low. An AI assistant naming three businesses in your category is choosing from a field where almost no one has done the work. The few who do are not better accountants, or better dentists, or better anything. They feed the machine better.
The concrete steps are the same in every edition we have published:
- Say plainly what you do, who for and where, in text specific enough for a machine to match to a real question.
- Label your answers in the structured format AI quotes from, the single highest-leverage change most sites can make.
- Name the real, credentialed people behind your content, in a way the machine can read, not an anonymous corporate voice.
- Earn genuine mentions on sources the AI already trusts.
- Keep the same business described consistently everywhere it appears.
None of that is a new file format or a growth hack. It is the fundamentals, and this benchmark is the evidence that they are still unclaimed almost everywhere.
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Read the editions behind this benchmark: The international report, UK Dentists, UK Accountants, West Midlands, or browse them all on the SAVI hub →
Further reading
The argument
Ronnie has written the other half of this on his own site, from the same index, cut by country: 216 websites in a million are ready to be recommended by AI. This page is the measurement. That one is what he thinks it means, and the two are deliberately different documents rather than the same piece twice.