The Crane Index measures how cleanly the AI engines that clients, candidates and procurement teams now consult can read each professional services firm and describe what it actually does.
A professional services firm sells judgement and trust, and a buyer can rarely see either before committing. So they ask an engine first. A finance director seeking auditors, a board hunting a search partner, a developer choosing an engineering consultancy: each opens with a question to an AI assistant, and the machine answers from what it can read on your site.
If it cannot parse who you serve, what you specialise in and where you work, it leaves you off the shortlist or describes you as something you are not. The mandate goes to the firm it understood, and that happens before anyone at your firm knows the enquiry existed.
Queued for its first measured run
The constituent list for Professional Services 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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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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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 firms a machine can read cleanly will keep being put forward by one, long after their rivals wonder where the enquiries went.
