Original research · July 2026
The State of AI Readiness 2026
As more people ask an AI assistant instead of searching, one question decides whether a brand shows up in the answer: can the AI reach, understand, and cite your site? We built a metric for it — the AI Pulse Score — and measured it across 13,838 live websites. This is the method and the open data behind the finding.
Headline finding
The web is reachable, but not machine-understandable. Sites score a median 95/100 on access and 91 on durability — but only 55 on structure and 43.8 on substance, the two things an answer engine needs to actually quote a page. 46.8% of sites grade D or F on overall AI readiness.
Source: Replatform Radar, The State of AI Readiness 2026 (n=13,838 sites). Free to cite with attribution and a link to this page.
The full methodology — every signal, weight, calibration constant, validation check, and limitation — is specified in the accompanying white paper, The AI Pulse Score: A Reproducible, Open Metric for Website AI-Readiness (v1.0), written so that any party can recompute any number in this study.
What the AI Pulse Score measures
Four things determine whether an AI answer engine can use your site. Each is scored 0–100; together they make the Pulse. The gap between the high pair (access, durability) and the low pair (structure, substance) is the whole story.
| Pillar | What it asks | Median score |
|---|---|---|
| Access | Can AI reach your content — crawler access, server-rendered content, no walls. | 95 |
| Structure | Can AI parse it — structured data, schema types, clean headings and metadata. | 55 |
| Substance | Is there something worth citing — answerable content, freshness, depth, trust signals. | 43.8 |
| Durability | Will it survive a migration — URL stability, content portability, cite-worthy pages on stable URLs. | 91 |
Nearly every site is on HTTPS and lets AI crawlers in — access is a solved problem. Where the web collapses is structure (schema markup, clean metadata) and substance (answerable, citable content). Those are exactly the signals a CMS migration drops on the floor if nobody is measuring — which is why the durability pillar exists.
Grades: 46.8% of the web is D or F
| Grade | A | B | C | D | F |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Share of sites | 3.9% | 23.7% | 25.7% | 37.4% | 9.4% |
AI readiness by CMS
Every platform with at least 15 measurable sites, by median AI Pulse. The pattern is clear: commerce and site-builder platforms lead (they ship product and structured-data schema by default), while legacy open-source CMSs lag. WordPress tops the list at 80.9; Joomla sits lowest at 64.8.
| Platform | Sites | Median AI Pulse |
|---|---|---|
| WordPress | 2,569 | 80.9 |
| Salesforce Commerce Cloud | 56 | 77.8 |
| Shopify | 24 | 77.5 |
| Optimizely (Episerver) | 54 | 76.5 |
| Wix | 23 | 76.4 |
| Concrete CMS | 24 | 76.2 |
| HubSpot CMS | 259 | 76.1 |
| Adobe Experience Manager | 386 | 76 |
| Squarespace | 17 | 73.4 |
| Adobe Commerce (Magento) | 30 | 72.8 |
| TYPO3 | 81 | 71.6 |
| Sitecore | 127 | 69.6 |
| Drupal | 492 | 69.1 |
| Unknown | 9,621 | 68.3 |
| Kentico | 26 | 67.1 |
| Joomla | 20 | 64.8 |
AI readiness by industry
Every industry with a reportable sample, by median AI Pulse. Content- and commerce-driven sectors — which live on being found — lead; institutional sectors lag.
| Industry | Sites | Median AI Pulse |
|---|---|---|
| Travel/Hospitality | 84 | 75.5 |
| Media/News/Publishing | 858 | 75.2 |
| Real Estate | 20 | 74.7 |
| Ecommerce/Retail | 349 | 73.9 |
| Healthcare/Medical | 108 | 72.7 |
| Finance/Insurance | 172 | 71.9 |
| Business/Professional Services | 188 | 71.6 |
| Technology/SaaS | 1,388 | 71.6 |
| Entertainment/Gaming | 675 | 69.3 |
| Education | 377 | 69.1 |
| Nonprofit/Community | 155 | 68.4 |
| Government/Public Sector | 193 | 66.4 |
| Blog/Personal | 31 | 59.4 |
Method & limitations
- Each site was fetched once at the homepage with a single identified request; no crawling. 13,838 were measurable; 790 were bot-walled or unreachable and are excluded, not counted as failures.
- All four pillars are objective response checks, so every site is scored identically. A separate LLM-judged content-density read (median 32.4 answerable units per 1k tokens, n=5,847) is published in the dataset but deliberately not folded into the headline score.
- Homepage-only, so content-depth signals are a floor (interior pages typically score higher). CMS is fingerprint-based; unfingerprinted sites are grouped as “Unknown”.
Cite this
Replatform Radar, The State of AI Readiness 2026, July 2026. replatformradar.com/research/ai-readiness-2026. Licensed CC BY 4.0.
Get your own site’s AI Pulse Score in seconds — free.
Check your AI Pulse →