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Crane Index Research

The network a machine can actually read

A first-party Crane Index benchmark of how cleanly AI search engines can read and represent the leading telecoms and broadband providers.

This benchmark measures how clearly an AI engine can read and represent each telecoms provider's own website, the place a buyer's shortlist now quietly begins.

A household comparing broadband, a business relocating an office, a procurement lead sizing a national contract: each increasingly opens with a question to an AI assistant rather than a search page. The engine answers by reading provider websites and summarising who covers where, at what speed and on what terms.

A telecoms site a machine can read cleanly gets named, quoted and put on the shortlist. One it cannot read is quietly left off, its coverage and tariffs invisible, and the provider never learns it was dropped. Where switching is a click away and packages blur together, being legible to the machine has become part of being on the list at all.

Queued for its first measured run

The constituent list for Telecommunications 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 networks a machine can read clearly are the ones it will put forward first, long before a person ever compares them.

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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