ORIGINAL DATA — 21 famous sites · scanned Nov 4, 2026
We ran our AI-citation analysis on 21 of the most famous pages on the internet — the pages everyone assumes "must be doing it right". Every score below is a real, unedited BriefBash result. Sites change; scores reflect each page as scanned.
| Average AI citation score | 5.4 / 10 |
|---|---|
| Sites with an llms.txt file | 19% — 81% are missing it |
| Sites that let AI crawlers in | 100% |
| Sites with structured data | 81% |
| Indexed by Google | 100% |
| Cited by Perplexity for their own query | 71% |
Being famous and indexed is not the same as being citable. The single cheapest fix across the board: publish an llms.txt.
| 4 / 10 | 3 sites | |
|---|---|---|
| 5 / 10 | 8 sites | |
| 6 / 10 | 9 sites | |
| 7 / 10 | 1 site |
| Site | Score | llms.txt | AI bots | Schema | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| gutenberg.org | 4/10 | ✕ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ 50+ |
| consumerreports.org | 4/10 | ✕ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ 50+ |
| paulgraham.com | 4/10 | ✕ | ✓ | ✕ | ✓ |
| w3schools.com | 5/10 | ✕ | ✓ | ✕ | ✓ 50+ |
| healthline.com | 5/10 | ✕ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ 50+ |
| docs.python.org | 5/10 | ✕ | ✓ | ✕ | ✓ 50+ |
| usa.gov | 5/10 | ✕ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ 50+ |
| nasa.gov | 5/10 | ✕ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ 50+ |
| searchenginejournal.com | 5/10 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ 50+ |
| ahrefs.com | 5/10 | ✕ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ 50+ |
| en.wikipedia.org | 5/10 | ✕ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ 50+ |
| python.org | 6/10 | ✕ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ 50+ |
| developer.mozilla.org | 6/10 | ✕ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ 50+ |
| react.dev | 6/10 | ✓ | ✓ | ✕ | ✓ 50+ |
| irs.gov | 6/10 | ✕ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ 50+ |
| nerdwallet.com | 6/10 | ✕ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ 50+ |
| blog.hubspot.com | 6/10 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ 50+ |
| rottentomatoes.com | 6/10 | ✕ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ 50+ |
| dev.to | 6/10 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ 37 |
| backlinko.com | 6/10 | ✕ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| moz.com | 7/10 | ✕ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
Linked sites have a full public teardown. Seven additional well-known sites could not be scored: six block server-side fetches outright (Britannica, Investopedia, Allrecipes, Edmunds, TripAdvisor, Zillow), and one failed content extraction (joelonsoftware.com).
Each page was analyzed with BriefBash: we measure llms.txt presence, AI-bot access in robots.txt, and structured data from the live site (measured, not guessed); indexation and Perplexity citation via live search; content structure and extractability from the page itself. The AI citation score is 0–10 with the blockers that cost the most points listed in each teardown.
Selection is not representative of the web — these are famous, mostly well-resourced sites, picked to test the assumption that prominence equals AI-readiness. Scores reflect each page as scanned on Nov 4, 2026.
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