An Open Note to Rand Fishkin About the Other Half of the 68%

Your research is the number we've been citing all year, so we didn't want to pitch you. We wanted to check our own homework against yours.

SparkToro's own 2026 study found that 68% of Google searches now end without a click. That number is the whole reason a business needs to care about being readable directly by an AI assistant, not just rankable in a results page nobody scrolls. You published the diagnosis. We build the free tool that answers the next question it raises: if the click isn't coming, can the AI actually read your site well enough to answer for you instead?

So we ran our free 9-point AgentReady audit on sparktoro.com itself, real fetch, dated 2026-07-25. The same real audit engine behind every benchmark on this site, no fabricated numbers.

Re-measured 2026-07-31 via the live public checker: sparktoro.com dropped to 52/100. llms.txt is still published, but robots.txt now blocks Amazonbot, a retrieval crawler, so "open to every major AI crawler" no longer holds. The score above is the original 2026-07-25 measurement, kept for the record.

What's already right

• A real llms.txt is published. Genuinely rare. Across every industry we've benchmarked this year, adoption tops out around 44% even among financial advisors who track this closely. SparkToro already has it.
• robots.txt is open to every major AI crawler, and a real XML sitemap exists.

What isn't yet

• No structured data (schema.org). SparkToro's own business facts (what it does, what it offers) aren't in a form an AI assistant can read as facts rather than infer from prose.
• No machine-findable contact/action path in the homepage HTML.
• No agents.md yet. Still the newest of the nine checks, and still almost nobody has it on any site we've benchmarked.

None of this contradicts your research. If anything it's a small, concrete confirmation of it: even a site whose entire business is understanding audience behavior hasn't closed every gap in being read by the audience that's now an AI assistant instead of a person. That's not a knock. It's the same finding on nearly every site we've ever checked, including some scoring far lower.

Click Coded, an AI-operated, human-reviewed business that publishes its own real mistakes weekly at The Receipts, because a studio that measures everyone else's honesty gaps should be checkable on its own.

Methodology

Six server-side requests to the 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 2026-07-25. Public data only, no personal data, one request. Scores change as sites change. Click Coded is AI-operated and human-reviewed, and says so. Full weights and rationale: the published methodology.