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Crane Index Research

When the machines answer for your energy company

A first-party Crane Index benchmark of how cleanly AI search engines can read and represent the leading energy and utility companies.

This benchmark reads the public website of every major energy and utility name the way an AI engine does, and measures how cleanly a machine can understand and represent it.

Switching a supplier, choosing who treats a region's water, sourcing renewable power for a factory, checking whether a company is sound enough to invest in or lend to: more of these decisions now begin with a question put to an AI engine rather than a search bar. The engine answers from what it can read on your site.

If tariffs, coverage areas, fuel mix, network role or safety record sit inside scripts and images a machine cannot parse, the answer it gives is thin, dated or plainly wrong, and it is given without you in the room. In a sector built on public trust and very long contracts, being quietly misread is expensive.

Queued for its first measured run

The constituent list for Energy and Utilities is set. The Crane Index re-scans every cohort on the first of the month, and this page fills with the full ranked field, every company named and scored across the three reads, the moment the first scan lands. Follow it and you will be first to the numbers.

Each cohort is run through the three Crane Index scanners, AI Search Readiness (can the engines that read live sites resolve you and extract what you sell), Agent Readiness (can an automated agent get in and act) and Brand Representation (can a machine confirm who you are), against each organisation's home page. Every check is deterministic, sites that refuse or cannot serve an automated reader are reported as unmeasured rather than scored, and the full dated result sets are archived so each re-run publishes the movement. This is an on-page read of the home page, the part you control on the page: it does not crawl the whole site, and it does not watch AI answers or track whether an engine currently cites you. Any score can be re-measured in about a minute on the free scanners.

Score your own domain now. The free AI Search Readiness scanner is the same instrument behind this benchmark and takes about a minute.

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Is your domain measured?

Type a domain to see whether it is in the Index and where it ranks. If it is not in yet, ask us to measure it on the next monthly scan.

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Be first to the next benchmark.

The Crane Index is re-run, and new cohorts are added. Join The Crane Briefing and you will be first to each one, with the senior read on what moved and why. One considered email, never noise.

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The companies a machine can read cleanly are the ones it will recommend, quote and put its trust in first.

Follow the research

Be first to the next benchmark.

The Crane Index is re-run, and new cohorts are added. Join The Crane Briefing and you will be first to each one, with the senior read on what moved and why. One considered email, never noise.

Double opt-in. Confirm once by email; one click unsubscribes you any time. See our Privacy Policy.

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The Senior Mind

Written by the practitioner
who does the work.

Nicholas Crane, founder of The Crane Consultancy
Nic Crane · Founder

A decade engineering profit at scale.

Led paid media for the LUSH Cosmetics global digital transformation across sixteen markets, recognised by Welocalize as Best Global Client Team. A power user of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and GTM, now applying that technical depth to AI search: structured data, entity signals and the machine readability that decides visibility in Google AI Overviews and answer engines. Google Partner. Stape Partner. Amazon Ads Partner.

The senior mind that wins the work is the senior mind that does the work.

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Most marketing newsletters are noise on a schedule. This is not that. Once a week I send a short, considered read on the shifts that actually change what you should do, in paid media, AI search and technical SEO. Filtered, weighted and signed off by me before it goes out. The judgement is mine, and now you can hear every edition in my own voice.

Nic CraneFounder, The Crane Consultancy

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