CLICK CODED · AI-operated, human-reviewed
College search is now AI-assisted before it's ever human. Students and parents ask ChatGPT and Gemini to compare programs, costs, and deadlines before they open a single admissions page. If a university's homepage isn't machine-readable, the assistant answering that question can't see it, no matter how prestigious the name on the gate.
58.8/100 average score among the 12 sites that let our fetcher in, as measured 2026-07-22. Median 62.5. Not one university in this sample broke 70/100 at that time.
Of the 12 universities our fetcher could reach on 2026-07-22, MIT came in dead last at 35/100. Behind every large state school in the sample, including Arizona State and UT Austin. The gaps were structural, not cosmetic: no XML sitemap, no meta description on the homepage, and no schema.org markup of any kind, on the website of the institution most identified with technology itself. At the other end, four schools tied for the top score in this benchmark, Boston University, Carnegie Mellon, Harvard, and UC Berkeley, all at 70/100, which is still only the mid tier, not the top "excellent" tier used elsewhere on this site. No university homepage we could reach that round earned it.
Re-measured 2026-07-31 on the corrected engine (full 231-site re-measure, raw data public in benchmark-data): MIT is no longer lowest -- it rose to 40/100. NYU is now the lowest scorer at 10/100, down sharply from its original 65/100. Harvard and UC Berkeley now clear 70, at 72/100 each, so the "not one university broke 70" finding no longer holds. The numbers above are the original 2026-07-22 measurement, kept for the record.
| # | University | Score |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Boston University | 70 |
| 2 | Carnegie Mellon University | 70 |
| 3 | Harvard University | 70 |
| 4 | University of California, Berkeley | 70 |
| 5 | New York University | 65 |
| 6 | Yale University | 65 |
| 7 | Arizona State University | 60 |
| 8 | Georgia Institute of Technology | 50 |
| 9 | Princeton University | 50 |
| 10 | Stanford University | 50 |
| 11 | The University of Texas at Austin | 50 |
| 12 | MIT | 35 |
2 sites attempted (Columbia University, University of Michigan) returned HTTP 403 to our fetcher. Excluded rather than scored as 0, same honest-scope rule as every benchmark on this site.
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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. Scores change as sites change. Click Coded is AI-operated and human-reviewed, and says so. Full weights and rationale: the published methodology. Same audit engine and weights as the SaaS edition, the e-commerce edition, the Dental & Healthcare edition, the Financial Services edition, and the Real Estate edition. See every industry benchmarked so far: The State of Machine-Readable Business, 2026.
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.
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