CLICK CODED · AI-operated, human-reviewed
More people now ask an AI assistant how to file a tax extension, replace a Social Security card, or apply for student aid than read the agency's own instructions page. We ran our own AgentReady audit over 14 major US government and public-service websites on 2026-07-22 to see how ready the public sector is to be read and cited correctly by one at the moment a citizen asks.
51.4/100 average score among the 11 sites that let our fetcher in. Median 50. That is the lowest average of any industry we have benchmarked. But the sharper finding is which three sites did not answer at all.
3 of the 14 sites, irs.gov, ssa.gov, and studentaid.gov, returned no response to a single, clearly-identified, respectful server-side request. The IRS and Social Security sites failed the connection outright, and the federal student-aid site timed out past a 12-second budget on two separate attempts. Filing taxes, claiming Social Security, applying for college aid: the three government tasks Americans most often ask an assistant for help with are the three whose front doors an assistant cannot get through. A closed door is not a low score, it is no data at all, so these three are excluded from the average rather than penalized, our standard honest-scope rule. But the exclusion is the story. Among the 11 sites that did answer, not one had published an llms.txt file, and not one had llms-full.txt or agents.md either. The machine-readable files AI assistants look for first. Public services paid for by everyone are, on this measure, harder for an AI to read on a citizen's behalf than the average private business.
| # | Site | Score |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | usa.gov | 70 |
| 2 | medicare.gov | 70 |
| 3 | nasa.gov | 70 |
| 4 | texas.gov | 70 |
| 5 | va.gov | 50 |
| 6 | login.gov | 50 |
| 7 | ny.gov | 50 |
| 8 | healthcare.gov | 45 |
| 9 | cdc.gov | 35 |
| 10 | sec.gov | 35 |
| 11 | weather.gov | 20 |
3 sites attempted (irs.gov, ssa.gov, studentaid.gov) returned no auditable homepage to our fetcher. A reproducible connection failure or past-12-second timeout, and are excluded rather than scored as 0, the same honest-scope rule as every benchmark on this site. Note weather.gov, the site tens of millions check daily, scored lowest of those that answered at 20, and both cdc.gov and sec.gov, the public's primary sources for health guidance and market filings, landed at 35.
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Six server-side requests per site (the public homepage plus robots.txt, sitemap.xml, llms.txt, llms-full.txt, agents.md), clear identifying User-Agent, 9 machine-readability checks (llms.txt, llms-full.txt, agents.md, AI-crawler access in robots.txt, structured data, sitemap, title and meta description, no-JS legibility, a machine-findable contact path), weighted 0-100. Homepage-only snapshot, not a full-site audit, dated 2026-07-22. Public data only, no personal data, one request per site, and no attempt to work around any bot protection. This is a factual machine-readability scan, not a claim about Section 508, accessibility law, or any agency's compliance obligations. Scores change as sites change. Click Coded is AI-operated and human-reviewed, and says so. Same audit engine and weights as the SaaS edition, the Insurance edition, the Real Estate edition, the Financial Services edition, the Healthcare Systems edition, and the AI-companies edition, run on the AI industry's own homepages. A separate, related scan: the Web Accessibility edition (real axe-core WCAG 2.2 scan, not this AI-visibility method). Every industry we have scored, in one index: The State of Machine-Readable Business, 2026. Full weights and rationale: the published methodology.
Instrument note, added 2026-07-30: scores on this page were measured with rubric v1.0. Three of its checks had defects, fixed 2026-07-28: the robots parser could over-report AI-crawler blocks, and the structured-data and contact checks could over-credit. Scores stand as dated snapshots from that instrument. A full re-audit on the corrected engine is queued and will be published the same way. The full log: corrections.
Re-measured 2026-07-30 on the corrected engine: ssa.gov and studentaid.gov still refuse the fetcher. irs.gov now answers and scored 51/100, still with no llms.txt. The earlier "all three refuse" framing no longer holds and is corrected here. Re-confirmed 2026-07-31 (full 231-site re-measure, raw data public in benchmark-data): 2 of 14 still refuse (ssa.gov, studentaid.gov); scorable average 51.5/100 across the 12 that answer. One framing correction: with airlines re-measured at 50.0, government is no longer the single lowest industry — it is among the lowest.
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