Agentic IntentThe answer still gets given
An assistant asked about your category does not say it could not find anything. It reads what it can, and where your own words are thin, it fills the gap from a reseller, a review site or a forum thread.
Research
The AI Readiness Index.
Every company in the S&P 500, checked one at a time for what an assistant can read about them beyond the page itself. 297 of the 494 that answered publish nothing built for the purpose; 64 block AI crawlers outright.
494 of the 500 served a home page on 25 September 2026; 27 could not be reached and are excluded. “Not an answer” means a file at the right address that returns a web page or an error, which an assistant cannot use. Full method →
By sector
No sector is ahead. Some are further behind.
| Sector | Checked | Nothing built | Readable file |
|---|---|---|---|
| Industrials | 83 | 51 | 14 |
| Financials | 75 | 47 | 10 |
| Health Care | 59 | 35 | 10 |
| Information Technology | 72 | 32 | 14 |
| Consumer Discretionary | 45 | 25 | 4 |
| Consumer Staples | 33 | 23 | 3 |
| Utilities | 31 | 21 | 2 |
| Materials | 25 | 18 | 5 |
| Real Estate | 30 | 17 | 6 |
| Energy | 21 | 17 | 0 |
| Communication Services | 20 | 11 | 3 |
The best-performing sector still has fewer than one company in five publishing a readable file. In energy, none of the twenty-one we checked do. This measures what is published for assistants, not whether a page can be fetched, which in almost every case it can.
What it means
Publishing nothing is not neutral. It is a vote for whoever did.
Blocking is a decision, not a default
64 companies disallow AI crawlers by name in robots.txt. That is the one case where an assistant genuinely cannot read them. It does not stop the question being asked. It only removes them from the answer.
The cheapest work you will do
Most of it is publishing what you already know in a form that can be read. It is a fraction of the cost of the campaign that sends people to ask the question.
Your own site takes thirty seconds.
The same checks as the index, run live on your address, with the result yours to keep.