Research · Local businesses
Can AI read local business websites? We tested 6,143 dealerships, hotels and dental practices.
By Cloute · Published October 1, 2026
The short answer
Cloute tested 6,143 local business websites across 58 US metros in October 2026. Most are readable to AI crawlers: few block AI search crawlers in robots.txt and few send an empty page without JavaScript. The risk differs sharply by industry: bot protection turned away a plain automated request on 29.5% of car dealership sites, 15.2% of hotel sites and 3.4% of dental practice sites. Among dental practices, 2.3% block PerplexityBot, Perplexity's search crawler, mostly through one website provider's default robots.txt.
of car dealership sites turned away an automated request
of hotel sites did the same
of dental practice sites did the same
Results by industry
| Industry | Sites tested | Refused or challenged | Robots.txt blocks AI search | Robots.txt blocks AI training | Near-empty without JavaScript |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Car dealerships | 2,915 | 29.5% | 0.3% | 2.2% | 2.3% |
| Hotels | 256 | 15.2% | 0% | 0.8% | 4.7% |
| Dental practices | 2,972 | 3.4% | 2.3% | 4% | 1.4% |
Key findings
- Bot protection, not robots.txt, is the main way local businesses turn AI away. Car dealerships are most exposed: 29.5% of 2,915 dealer sites answered a plain automated request with a block or a bot challenge.
- Very few businesses block AI search on purpose. 0.3% of dealerships and 0% of hotel websites disallow an AI search crawler in robots.txt.
- Dental practices are the exception. 2.3% (68 practices) block PerplexityBot. 60 of those 68 use the same robots.txt template from ProSites, a dental website provider: it allows a named list of crawlers, including OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, Claude-SearchBot and Perplexity-User, and disallows every other crawler, which includes PerplexityBot, GPTBot and ClaudeBot.
- Most local websites put their content in the HTML: 1.4% of dental, 2.3% of dealer and 4.7% of hotel homepages were near-empty without JavaScript.
- Many hotels do not have a website of their own: chain properties in the same metro often share one brand website, which is why 256 unique hotel websites came from 58 metros.
What PerplexityBot does, and why the dental finding matters
Perplexity says PerplexityBot is the crawler that surfaces and links websites in Perplexity's search results, while Perplexity-User fetches a page when a user's question needs it. A practice that blocks PerplexityBot but allows Perplexity-User can still be opened during an answer, but is missing from the index Perplexity searches first. Practices on the template can ask their provider to add PerplexityBot to the allowed list.
Why readability matters
AI engines name the businesses they read. Across 64,441 AI answers about local businesses, a business was named 84% of the time when the engine had opened one of its own pages while answering, and 16% when it had not.
How the study was done
- Websites were collected from Google Maps listings for new-car dealerships, hotels and dentists in 58 US metros, one per unique domain.
- Each site's robots.txt was read and evaluated for the homepage, per AI crawler, using the most specific matching group.
- Each homepage was requested once, identifying as an ordinary web browser, without running JavaScript; readable text in the returned HTML was measured.
- No request pretended to be an AI crawler. Bot-protection results describe how sites treat automated clients in general.
- The ProSites attribution was confirmed by reading each blocking site's robots.txt for the template's own markers and checking the site's HTML.
Limitations
- Some firewalls let verified AI crawlers through while blocking other automated traffic, so a refused request is a risk signal, not proof that a given engine is blocked.
- Only homepages were tested.
- Google Maps results favour larger and better-reviewed businesses in each metro.
Read next
The full dealership results, by platform AI visibility for dental practices AI visibility for hotels What is PerplexityBot?Questions people ask
Do local businesses block AI crawlers?
Rarely on purpose in robots.txt, except dental practices on one provider's template (2.3% block PerplexityBot). More often, bot protection turns AI away: 29.5% of dealer sites, 15.2% of hotel sites and 3.4% of dental sites refused a plain automated request.
Does ProSites block AI crawlers?
On the dental sites we tested that use its robots.txt template, PerplexityBot, GPTBot and ClaudeBot are disallowed, while OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, Claude-SearchBot and Perplexity-User are allowed. 60 of the 68 dental practices blocking PerplexityBot used that template.
How do I check whether AI can read my website?
Read your robots.txt for the AI crawler names, ask your website provider how its bot protection treats verified AI crawlers, and look in your server logs for ChatGPT-User, OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot.
How to cite this research
Cloute (October 2026). Can AI read local business websites? 6,143 sites tested. https://cloute.ai/research/can-ai-read-local-business-websites
The underlying data is open under CC BY 4.0: github.com/luked9/cloute-ai-visibility-research.
About Cloute. Cloute is an AI visibility company for local businesses. It measures how often ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews recommend a business against its local competitors, and works every month to move it to the top.