Australians are increasingly starting their research inside an AI assistant instead of a Google results page. Ask ChatGPT or Gemini "who is a good family lawyer in Perth" or "the best gelato in Melbourne" and it does not hand back ten blue links. It names a few businesses. Being one of the named businesses is a new discipline, answer engine optimisation (AEO), and most Australian small businesses have done nothing for it. We wanted real numbers, so we tested 42 of them.
2 in 3
Australian SMEs are not ready for AI search (only Partial or Invisible).
1 in 8
actively block AI crawlers in robots.txt, almost always by accident.
1 in 5
have any FAQ or answer content, the format AI assistants quote most.
Why AI search visibility matters
When an assistant answers a "who should I use" question, it draws on the sites it can crawl and understand. Three things decide whether your business makes the shortlist. First, can AI crawlers reach you? Your robots.txt must not block GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot or Google-Extended. Second, can they understand you? Structured data (JSON-LD) needs to state who you are and what you do. Third, can they quote you? Clear, answer-formatted content and clean identity signals give an assistant something safe to repeat. We scored every site against exactly those signals.
How we ran the study
We selected six genuine, independent Australian SMEs in each of seven sectors (42 in total), deliberately excluding national chains, franchises and portals, and spread across every state and territory. For each site we fetched the live homepage, its robots.txt and its llms.txt, and scored five components out of 20 for a total out of 100: AI crawler access, structured data, answer-formatted content, entity clarity, and emerging AEO signals. We then banded each site as AI-Ready (80 or more), Partial (50 to 79) or Invisible (below 50). Every score is based on evidence we actually fetched, not estimates.
The results, sector by sector
Retail and health led the field, while hospitality came last: not a single restaurant or cafe we tested had business-entity structured data on its homepage. Real estate was dragged down by a hosting default that blocks AI crawlers automatically.
| Sector | Avg /100 | AI-Ready | Partial | Invisible |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Retail & Ecommerce | 75 | 3 | 3 | 0 |
| Health & Allied Health | 74 | 2 | 4 | 0 |
| Trades & Home Services | 73 | 2 | 4 | 0 |
| Legal & Professional Services | 71 | 3 | 3 | 0 |
| Beauty & Personal Care | 66 | 2 | 3 | 1 |
| Real Estate & Property | 60 | 2 | 1 | 3 |
| Hospitality & Food | 52 | 0 | 5 | 1 |
| All sectors | 67 | 14 (33%) | 23 (55%) | 5 (12%) |
The stat that surprised us
One Adelaide accountant had the richest structured data of any site in the study, yet scored as Invisible. The reason had nothing to do with their content: their Cloudflare configuration was serving an "ai-train=no" signal and blocking the major AI crawlers outright. Three real-estate firms met the same fate through a single Squarespace toggle. In every case, the business had no idea it was happening.
Five things we learned
1. Two-thirds are not AI-ready
Being findable on Google is no longer the finish line. 67% of the sites we tested were only Partial or Invisible to AI, meaning an assistant would struggle to confidently name and describe them.
2. The platform lottery is real
The single biggest factor was often not effort, it was the CMS or host. Shopify now auto-publishes an llms.txt on every store and Yoast increasingly does the same on WordPress, while a Squarespace toggle or a Cloudflare setting can quietly fence AI out. One accountant had the richest structured data in the whole study and was still Invisible, because Cloudflare was serving "ai-train=no" and blocking the crawlers.
3. Blocking AI is usually an accident
Of the businesses blocking AI bots, none appeared to have made a deliberate choice. They inherited a default from their platform or security tool. Every owner should open their own robots.txt this week and check.
4. The FAQ gap is the easiest win in the country
Only 1 in 5 sites had answer-formatted content, yet that is exactly the shape AI assistants quote. A clear FAQ with FAQPage schema is a same-day change that most sectors are simply not making.
5. llms.txt is arriving whether owners notice or not
40% of sites already served one, but almost all were auto-generated by Shopify or Yoast rather than deliberately written. The businesses that hand-author theirs are telling AI assistants exactly how to represent them, a genuine early-mover edge.
How to check your own site
You can run the same first checks we did in a few minutes:
- 1. Visit
yourdomain.com.au/robots.txtand search for GPTBot, ClaudeBot and Google-Extended. If any say "Disallow: /", AI cannot read you. - 2. Check whether your homepage has JSON-LD structured data and a real, on-page FAQ section.
- 3. See whether
yourdomain.com.au/llms.txtexists.
Or run all of it automatically with our free AEO Checker, which tests whether ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity can actually see and cite your Australian business, with no signup. If you would rather have it handled, our AEO services get Australian businesses cited by the assistants their customers now ask first.