Buyers have stopped typing keywords and started asking questions. Which provider should I use. Compare these three. Who does this near me, and are they any good. The engines that answer, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews, read live websites to do it, and agents are beginning to act on what they find. On the measure that now decides whether a machine can find, trust and name you, being unreadable is the new invisibility.
So we built the Crane Index™: three deterministic reads of any website. Can AI retrieve you. Can an agent act on you. Can a machine confirm, from your own pages, who you are. Anyone can run those three reads on their own site through our AI Visibility Suite. We then turned the same measure on the UK, cohort by cohort, and today we are bringing the results together in a new Research section: every company named, every score verifiable live in about a minute.
The first two cohorts were not close.
The best-funded names in the UK could not be read
We ran the FTSE 100 first, measured on 19 July 2026. More than half of the primary corporate sites we approached could not be read by an automated reader at all. Of the ones that could, the median AI Search read was 48 out of 100, and not one reached 70 on the Crane Index. These are the largest, best-resourced companies in the country, and budget bought none of them legibility.
Then the UK's biggest online retailers, measured on 20 July 2026. Forty-four of the largest storefronts refused an automated reader outright. Of the 77 a machine could read, not one reached 70. The top of the entire field was not a giant. It was Riverford, the Devon veg-box company, at 62, with Amazon UK's storefront on 20.
Structure beats size
One pattern held across both cohorts, and it is the reason a veg-box firm can outscore Amazon. In each cohort, every one of the ten strongest sites carried valid, disambiguated Organization data, the machine-readable statement of who they are, and not one of the ten weakest did.
Catalogue depth, brand fame and media budget measure how humans reach you. AI visibility measures whether a machine can resolve you as one entity and repeat your commercial facts without inventing them. They are different tests. The first rewards size. The second rewards structure, and structure is cheap, which is exactly why the incumbents are not winning it by default.
Every major industry is next
A single cohort is a headline. A programme is a record. So we are extending the Crane Index across the industries the market is actually organised around:
- Travel and Hospitality
- Financial Services
- Automotive
- Technology and SaaS
- Healthcare
- Media and Entertainment
- Consumer Goods
- Property and Real Estate
- Education
- Professional Services
Same three reads. Every company named. Every cohort archived and re-run, so what changes becomes public record rather than a one-off number, and the movement is the story.
Follow your industry
If your sector is on that list, you can follow it now, and you will be first to the benchmark the day it lands, with the senior read on what moved and why. If it is not, tell me, and I will look at adding it.
The organisations that win the next few years of discovery will not be the ones that spent the most. They will be the ones a machine could read. We are about to show, industry by industry, exactly who those are.
