We Audited 20 SEO Companies. The Industry Building the Tools Isn't Ready for Its Own Future.

We pointed our agent readiness scanner at 20 of the most-recognized SEO and AI-search companies on April 6, 2026. The average score was 8.6 out of 100. The companies whose entire business is helping other companies get found by search engines are not, themselves, set up to be found by agents.

Here is the full table, ranked.

Score	Company	Has	Missing
44	Syndicate Links	llms.txt, agent.json, affiliate	structured data on homepage
28	Otterly AI	llms.txt, agent.json, pricing	structured data, API docs, MCP
10	Kalicube	llms.txt	agent.json, structured data, API
10	Frase	llms.txt	agent.json, structured data, API
10	Yoast	llms.txt	agent.json, structured data
10	Shopify	llms.txt	agent.json, structured data
5	Ahrefs	robots.txt only	llms.txt, agent.json, structured data
5	Semrush	robots.txt only	llms.txt, agent.json, structured data
5	Moz	robots.txt only	llms.txt, agent.json, structured data
5	Screaming Frog	robots.txt only	llms.txt, agent.json, structured data
5	InLinks	robots.txt only	llms.txt, agent.json, structured data
5	Botify	robots.txt only	llms.txt, agent.json, structured data
5	SparkToro	robots.txt only	llms.txt, agent.json, structured data
5	iPullRank	robots.txt only	llms.txt, agent.json, structured data
5	MarketMuse	robots.txt only	llms.txt, agent.json, structured data
5	OpenAI	robots.txt only	llms.txt, agent.json, structured data
5	Anthropic	robots.txt only	llms.txt, agent.json, structured data
5	Stiga USA	robots.txt only	llms.txt, agent.json, structured data
0	Surfer SEO	nothing detected	robots.txt, llms.txt, agent.json
0	Profound	nothing detected	robots.txt, llms.txt, agent.json

The headline numbers:

• 6 of 20 sites have an llms.txt.
• 2 of 20 have an agent.json.
• 0 of 20 reference MCP anywhere on their homepage.
• The mode score is 5 — the points you get for having a robots.txt and nothing else.

Some of these companies sell software whose entire pitch is "get discovered." Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz, Botify, MarketMuse, Surfer — every name on this list is in the discoverability business. None of them publishes a machine-readable description of what they sell, who their API is, or how an agent should talk to them. Profound and Surfer SEO scored zero. That is not a typo.

We also scanned both major model labs because we wanted to know if the people training the agents had thought about being read by them. OpenAI: 5. Anthropic: 5. Robots.txt and nothing else.

We should be honest about our own number too. We scored 44, which is the highest in the set, and we are still missing JSON-LD Organization / Product markup on the homepage. The site we use to sell agent-readiness consulting is a B+ at agent readiness. That is the joke we are telling on ourselves while we ship the rest.

A note on methodology, because the scoring matters more than the leaderboard. The scanner does server-side checks against publicly accessible files only:

• robots.txt exists and parses
• llms.txt exists at root
• agent.json (or equivalent) exists at root
• Homepage source HTML contains JSON-LD blocks
• Homepage source mentions an API, MCP server, or partner program

Homepage analysis is source HTML only — we do not execute JavaScript. That is intentional. The crawlers we are scoring against (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Grok, Claude's web tool) do not execute JavaScript either. If your "About" page is a React shell that hydrates client-side, it does not exist as far as those crawlers are concerned. Several of the companies on this list lose points for exactly this reason. We will write about that one separately.

Score your own site here: syndicatelinks.co/tools/agent-readiness-audit. The methodology is the same one we ran above.