Home › SEO Audit › 2026 Data Study
We took the top 300 domains from the Tranco ranking and crawled each homepage. 181 served a normal HTML page. Even the most-visited sites in the world miss cheap, obvious things – and AI-readiness is the new gap.
The headline numbers
Out of 181 homepages that rendered for our crawler.
| Check | Sites failing | Share |
|---|---|---|
| No JSON-LD structured data | 61 | 34% |
| No llms.txt (AI-readiness) | 61 | 34% |
| No Open Graph image | 51 | 28% |
| No sitemap listed in robots.txt | 49 | 27% |
| Not exactly one H1 | 47 | 26% |
| No canonical tag | 42 | 23% |
| No meta description | 35 | 19% |
| Meta description the wrong length | 35 | 19% |
| Image without alt text | 23 | 13% |
| Title tag over 60 characters | 21 | 12% |
| No mobile viewport tag | 18 | 10% |
| Blocks GPTBot | 8 | 4% |
| Not on HTTPS | 0 | 0% |
What stands out
AI-readiness is the new gap
34% have no llms.txt and 4% actively block GPTBot. HTTPS migration is finished industry-wide; the unhandled frontier is being legible to AI answer engines.
Structured data is still widely missing
More than a third ship no JSON-LD. It is not a ranking factor on its own, but it powers rich results, clarifies entities, and feeds the AI layer that decides who to cite.
The social preview is an afterthought
28% have no Open Graph image – so shared links show a blank card. You paid for the traffic; the preview is where the click is won or lost.
H1s and canonicals are still mishandled
26% do not have exactly one H1 and 23% have no canonical. Basic hygiene, and it shows even large teams let it drift.
What this means for your site
Methodology and limitations
- Sample: the top 300 domains in the Tranco ranking (list of 2026-09-20).
- What we fetched: each homepage over HTTPS, plus /robots.txt and /llms.txt, with a standard crawler user-agent and a 15-second timeout.
- What we measured: title and meta description presence/length, H1 count, canonical, viewport, Open Graph image, JSON-LD, image alt coverage, HTTPS, the sitemap line in robots.txt, llms.txt, and a GPTBot block.
- What we did not measure: Core Web Vitals, content quality or backlinks. Percentages are of the 181 pages that rendered.
Sources
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