The State of AI Visibility 2026. Insurance Edition

More people now get their first quote comparison from an AI assistant than from an agent's office. We ran our own AgentReady audit over 14 major US insurance carriers on 2026-07-22 to see who is actually ready to be found, read, and cited by one at the moment a shopper asks.

69.4/100 average score among the 8 carriers that let our fetcher in. Median 70. But the headline is who did not answer at all.

The real finding: insurance is the most locked-down vertical we have measured, after hotels

6 of the 14 carriers, Geico, Allstate, Farmers, Nationwide, The Hartford, and USAA, would not return their own public homepage to a single, clearly-identified, respectful request. Nationwide answered with an explicit HTTP 403, Geico refused the connection outright, and Allstate, Farmers, The Hartford, and USAA each timed out past a 12-second budget on two separate attempts. That is a 43% block rate, the second-highest of any industry we have benchmarked, behind only hotels. A closed front door is not a low score, it is no data at all: these six are excluded from the average rather than penalized, our standard honest-scope rule. But the exclusion is the story. At the exact moment shopping agents are becoming how people compare coverage, six of the biggest names in the business were invisible to ours. Among the 8 that did answer, only 3, Aflac, Liberty Mutual, and MetLife, had published an llms.txt file, and not one carrier in the entire sample had llms-full.txt or agents.md, the files AI agents read first. Re-measured 2026-07-30 on the corrected engine: all six refusals re-confirmed, same six names, and Aflac, Liberty Mutual and MetLife remain the only three with llms.txt (each now scoring 90/100).

The ranking

6 carriers attempted (Geico, Allstate, Farmers, Nationwide, The Hartford, USAA) returned no auditable homepage to our fetcher. An explicit 403 for Nationwide, a refused connection for Geico, and reproducible past-12-second timeouts for the rest. Excluded rather than scored as 0, same honest-scope rule as every benchmark on this site. Progressive, the carrier whose whole brand is quote comparison, answered but scored 50, missing the structured data a comparison agent needs most.

Methodology

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. 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 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.