Audit finds most major websites aren't AI agent-ready
A technical audit of 50 major websites across retail, SaaS, travel, publishing and finance — run by SALT.agency and published by Search Engine Journal — scored each against 12 machine-readability signals, from robots.txt directives to JSON-LD schema. Airbnb scored highest at 79.2%; the average site implemented just over half the signals (56.6%), and only 5 of 50 had adopted Cloudflare’s Content Signals Policy. The steepest shortfall was at the “agent transaction” layer, where AI agents complete tasks via OAuth discovery protocols: 46 of 48 sites scored zero, and the audit found nearly two-thirds of sites had made no deliberate decision about which AI bots can access their content.
Why it matters: The steepest gap sits at agent-transaction protocols like OAuth, not citation-facing basics like schema markup — suggesting the next AEO frontier is letting AI agents act on a site, not just read it.
Posted to the wire September 1, 2026.