We kept telling business owners that Ai decides who to recommend partly from what it can read about them online. So we got curious: how ready are normal local businesses for that, really? We picked 56 of them around Phoenix and Scottsdale — dentists, injury lawyers, med spas, HVAC companies, hair salons, restaurants — and checked.
The results were not what we expected. The scary story you hear — “businesses are accidentally blocking Ai from their websites!” — basically didn't happen. But almost everyone was missing one specific, new thing.
First, the good news: nobody's locking AI out
Short version: Zero of the 56 sites were blocking Ai crawlers. The “you're accidentally blocking AI” panic didn't hold up here.
Every single site let Ai tools in. And the older technical basics were mostly handled too: about 9 in 10 had structured data on their homepage (the behind-the-scenes labels that tell software what a business is), and about 9 in 10 had a sitemap (the table of contents that helps anything crawl the site). If you were losing sleep over those, you can probably stop.
Now the gap: almost nobody has the new thing
Short version: 70% had no llms.txt — a short, plain-language summary that tells Ai tools who you are and which pages matter.
Think of llms.txt as a one-page cheat sheet you leave out for Ai: your business name, what you do in a paragraph, and the few pages worth reading (about, services, contact). It's new enough that most businesses simply haven't heard of it — which is exactly why it's an opportunity. When almost no one in your area has done something easy, doing it is how you stand out.
The old boxes are mostly checked. The new one — the one made for Ai — is wide open.
What this means for you
If you run a local business, the takeaway isn't “panic about AI.” It's that the basics you may have paid for years ago are probably fine, and the highest-value move right now is the cheapest one almost no one has made: publish a short, accurate summary for Ai tools, and keep your core facts consistent everywhere.
How we checked: we ran automated public-website checks (no Ai calls, no paid data) on 56 reachable businesses across six categories in the Phoenix/Scottsdale area in June 2026. We looked at four things any tool can see: whether the site blocks Ai crawlers, whether it has an llms.txt, whether the homepage has structured data, and whether it has a sitemap. It's a snapshot of one metro, not the whole country — but the pattern was consistent across every category.