SAVI Report · Birmingham · 2026
More and more people ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Google's AI to find them a plumber in Kings Heath, a dentist in Harborne or a table in Digbeth. The AI reads business websites and suggests two or three names. We checked 6,078 Birmingham business websites, one by one, to see how ready each one is to be suggested. Six are fully ready. This report shows what the other 6,072 are missing, and how little it takes to catch up. It is also the starting point for the Birmingham Business Growth Initiative, which sets out to raise these numbers across the city.
Birmingham isn't hiding from AI. Almost every website lets AI in, and almost all of them load properly. What's missing is the information AI needs to pick one business over another: clear answers to customers' questions, the names of the people behind the business, and a fact worth repeating. 3,491 businesses, 57% of those we checked, have none of the three.
Is your business one of the six, or one of the 6,072? Check your score free, in about a minute.
Every business gets a score from 0 to 100 for how ready its website is to be found, understood and recommended by AI. Eight in ten sit in the crowded middle: easy enough to find on Google, but missing what AI looks for before it recommends anyone.
When AI suggests two or three businesses, it picks the ones whose websites it can read, check and quote. 286 Birmingham businesses are within two points of a score of 70, and 18 are within two points of 80. For most of them, the gap is an afternoon's work.
The score is made up of eight parts. Birmingham's websites do well on the technical basics. They do badly on the parts that tell AI who the business is and why it can be trusted.
We also scored every business for ordinary Google search. The city averages 60.7 for Google and 54.9 for AI, and 82% of businesses do better on Google. The work that got them found on Google hasn't been done for the AI tools that now answer people's questions directly.
Look at the scores area by area and a clear pattern shows. The business district around Colmore Row, Eastside and the shopping centre are at the top. The local high streets are in the middle. Southside and Digbeth, the city's food, nightlife and creative quarter, are at the bottom: nine points behind Colmore, with one business in five scoring under 40. The areas line up closely with Birmingham's Business Improvement Districts, the local business partnerships for each part of the city.
No type of business averages 70. The best, offices such as consultants and financial advisers, and physiotherapists, reach about 61. Restaurants, hotels and schools, the places most people in the city use every week, are at the bottom.
We checked 583 restaurants, more than any other type of business, and they average 50.3. 104 score under 40. Only 12 score 70 or more, and just 4% label their questions and answers so AI can use them.
25 of the city's 99 hotels score under 40, the worst rate of any type of business. Only a third have a picture set to show when their link is shared, and only just over half have the short summary Google shows under their link.
81 school websites, an average of 48.8, and none above 70. Only 16% have the hidden labels AI reads, and 15% have a summary for Google. Parents are starting to ask AI to compare schools, and these websites give it almost nothing to go on.
Law firms make up three of the city's six fully ready businesses, and 45 law firms score under 40. Being in a strong field guarantees nothing: 681 firms, average 58.6.
Businesses write about what they do, list their services and answer customers' questions. Then they stop one step short. Websites can carry hidden labels in their code that tell AI "this is the owner", "this is a question and its answer", "this is where we are". Customers never see them, but AI relies on them, and most Birmingham websites don't have them.
Only 25% of businesses label the owner, partner or lead expert so AI knows who they are. Those that do average 67.1; those that don't average 50.8. That 16-point gap is the biggest for any single habit.
Of the 1,857 businesses with questions and answers on their website, 1,452 never label them. The answers are there, but AI has to work out that they're answers.
The 405 businesses that label their questions and answers average 69.5. The 5,673 that don't average 53.9. Adding the label takes about an hour.
229 businesses have a setting on their website that tells ChatGPT to stay out, and 66 shut out ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity all at once. Restaurants (44) and solicitors (31) do it most. Most won't know it's there.
469 websites look fine to people but almost empty to AI, because their words only appear after the page runs extra code that AI tools often don't run. They average 46.0, against 55.7 for everyone else.
1,127 businesses have a short guide file written for AI tools (called llms.txt), the most we've seen in any report so far. They average 61.9, against 53.3 without one. No AI tool has confirmed it reads the file, so treat this as a sign of a well-kept website rather than a cause.
Years in business, customers served, jobs completed, a review score: only 151 businesses in the city, 2.5%, put a specific number like this on their homepage. AI answers love specifics. 5,927 businesses give it none.
Compare the top 10% (607 businesses, scoring 69.5 or more) with everyone else. They aren't bigger or better known. They label the things the rest leave unlabelled.
They're small firms and local trades, not chains or household names. Every one answers customers' questions on its website, names the people behind the business, and labels what it does and where. None of that is beyond any other business in the city.
How we did this. We looked at each business's live website the way an AI tool would, ran the same 300+ checks SearchScore uses for AI, Google and how well a site turns visitors into customers, and turned the AI checks into a score out of 100. Each website also got a separate score for ordinary Google search. We found the businesses in two places: Google business listings across 27 types of local business (7,501 businesses) and OpenStreetMap, the free public map (905 schools, places of worship, community groups, offices, independent shops, cafes and restaurants). Every one has a Birmingham (B) postcode. National chains, NHS sites and libraries were left out. That gave 8,406 websites; 6,945 could be checked. The 1,461 we could not check (closed down, parked, blocking automated visits or with a broken security certificate) are left out, not counted as zero. The figures in this report cover 6,078 businesses: the 6,945, minus 865 marketing agencies and web designers, whose websites are their trade and would make the city look better than it is, and two websites: a software company listed under the wrong type of business, and an accountancy website that has since closed. Every website was checked in October 2026 with the same version of our scoring. The eight parts of the score and their weights are set out on the SAVI hub. Several of the habits compared in this report (the hidden labels, a named person, a questions-and-answers section) are themselves part of the score, so the gaps between businesses that have them and businesses that do not show what the leaders do differently, not what one change would add. Where we say a website shuts ChatGPT out, we mean its robots file blocks GPTBot, the crawler ChatGPT uses; where we say a page looks blank to AI, we mean the page as fetched without running its scripts, which is how many AI tools read it; the AI guide file (llms.txt) is one no AI tool has yet confirmed it reads. We name only the six businesses that are fully ready; everyone else stays anonymous.