Buyers increasingly ask ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity who to hire. So we tested whether AI can even read the industry's own websites: all 50 agencies on the Prolific North Top 50 Digital Agencies 2025 list, checked for the machine-readable signals AI systems depend on. The results are worth sitting with, whichever side of the hiring table you're on.
of the UK’s top 50 digital agencies have NO structured data (JSON-LD) on their homepage at all
have an llms.txt file, the machine-readable index AI assistants look for
show no prices anywhere on their homepage
render so little text without JavaScript that AI crawlers effectively see a blank page
actively block ChatGPT’s crawler (GPTBot) from reading their site
median words of AI-readable text on a top-50 agency homepage
Source: Mode Marketing original research, July 2026. Set: the Prolific North Top 50 Digital Agencies 2025. Aggregate results only · this is a health check on an industry, not a scoreboard of names.
These are the UK's most successful digital agencies: a combined £800m+ in fee income, the people businesses pay to be found. Yet nearly 4 in 10 give AI systems no structured data to verify who they are, barely 1 in 7 provides the machine-readable index AI assistants look for, and a handful serve pages that AI crawlers see as essentially blank, because most AI crawlers do not execute JavaScript.
Three even block ChatGPT's crawler outright. That is a legitimate editorial choice for a publisher protecting content; for a business that wants to be recommended, it is switching off the shop sign at the exact moment buyers started asking AI who to trust.
And the transparency finding repeats what we documented in our State of the UK Agency Market research: 88% of the top 50 show no pricing at all on their homepage. When an AI assistant is asked “what does a website cost and who will build it at that price”, most of the industry has, quite literally, no answer on the page.
The point is not that big agencies are careless. It is that machine readability is brand new as a commercial priority, almost nobody has caught up, and that is precisely the window: for a small business, being genuinely readable by AI is one of the few games where you can outrun companies a thousand times your size.
July 2026. For each of the 50 agencies on the Prolific North Top 50 Digital Agencies 2025 list we fetched the homepage and recorded: presence of JSON-LD structured data; presence of an llms.txt file; the volume of text readable without executing JavaScript (as most AI crawlers see it); visible pricing; and the HTTP response served to ChatGPT's crawler user-agent (GPTBot). 47 of 50 sites were reachable at test time; percentages are of the full 50. Aggregates only, deliberately: the purpose is a picture of the industry, not a league table. Figures are a point-in-time snapshot and sites change · corrections welcome at hello@modemarketing.ai.
No. AI crawlers like GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot generally do not execute JavaScript, so sites that render their content client-side can appear nearly empty to them. In Mode’s July 2026 test of the UK’s top 50 digital agencies, three rendered fewer than 200 words of readable text, and one rendered just 8 words. A site AI cannot read is a site AI cannot recommend.
Structured data (JSON-LD schema) is machine-readable markup that tells search engines and AI assistants who you are, what you sell, and how to verify you. It underpins how AI systems identify and trust businesses. In Mode’s test, 38% of the UK’s top 50 digital agencies had none at all on their homepage.
A plain-text index at yourdomain.com/llms.txt that gives AI systems a curated summary of your business and pages. It is an emerging convention for AI-agent readiness, recognised by Chrome’s Lighthouse audits. Only 7 of the UK’s top 50 digital agencies had one in July 2026.
Three quick checks: view your site with JavaScript disabled and see how much text survives; check whether yourdomain.com/llms.txt exists; and paste a page into a schema validator to see if structured data is present. Or ask an AI assistant what it knows about your business. Mode runs this as a fixed-price AI Visibility Check, scored and benchmarked against your competitors.
We ran these checks on the industry because we run them for clients every week. The AI Visibility Check is the same measurement on your business: does AI mention you, can it read you, and the top three fixes · benchmarked against your three closest competitors.
AI VISIBILITY CHECK · £95Honest by design: we measure signals, not guarantees. How GEO works.