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GoGoChimp Research · Benchmark · October 2026
On 7 October 2026 we scored 244 websites for how ready their pages are to be quoted by AI engines. This is where the web stands.
244
sites scored
66
median Rubric score
77%
of sites below the 70 quotable line
49
median Trusted score, the weakest pillar
Across 244 websites scored on 7 October 2026, the median site reached 66 out of 100 for AI citability. Seventy-seven per cent sat below 70, the line a page has to clear to be treated as quotable, and Trusted was the weakest pillar, at 49.
We re-crawled every site in Rubric’s benchmark corpus with the same engine, up to 40 pages each. The corpus is a mix of online shops, blogs and publishers, SaaS companies and other businesses, built from audits run on Rubric and sites we added to broaden it. We left out GoGoChimp’s own two sites. Of the remaining 299, 244 could be scored. The rest blocked AI crawlers, served a firewall challenge or exposed too little to score, and they are covered further down.
It is not a random sample of the web, so read it as a dated snapshot. We will re-crawl and update it as the corpus grows. The yardstick: Rubric scores each page from 0 to 100, a site’s score is the average of its pages, and 70 is the line a page has to clear to be treated as quotable. For the checks behind each score, see how the score is built.
Main findings
Contents
How to read this paper. Every figure comes from GoGoChimp’s Rubric crawl of 7 October 2026, with one engine and one page cap. Rubric scores pages from 0 to 100, and 70 is the line at which a page counts as quotable. Rubric predicts citability, it doesn’t count citations. No site is named.
Most sites are legible as an entity, and about half are easy to lift an answer from. Trust is where the web falls down. 226 of the 244 sites score under 70 on Trusted. The signals an engine uses to decide whether a page is safe to quote, such as a named author, sourced figures, external references and a recent date, are the ones most sites leave out.
Median pillar score, 244 sites
Trusted is the only pillar with a median below 70, the quotable line. 226 of the 244 sites score under 70 on it. Source: GoGoChimp Rubric crawl of 7 October 2026, scoring version 2026-10-01, up to 40 pages per site.
| Pillar | What it asks | Median | Below 70 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Known | Can an engine tell who you are? | 71 | 41% |
| Findable | Can it lift an answer from the page? | 68 | 57% |
| Trusted | Will it stake an answer on you? | 49 | 93% |
These checks failed on more than half the applicable pages at the most sites. All five are writing or markup fixes. None needs a rebuild.
Share of sites failing the check on most pages
All five are writing or markup fixes, not rebuilds. Source: GoGoChimp Rubric crawl of 7 October 2026, scoring version 2026-10-01, up to 40 pages per site.
| Check | Sites failing |
|---|---|
| Named author | 82% |
| Answer-first opener (40 to 70 words) | 81% |
| Headings that ask a question or make a claim | 75% |
| Schema that says what the page is | 70% |
| Two or more external source links | 57% |
The homepage scored higher than the median inner page at 225 of the 244 sites, 92 per cent, by a median of 12 points. A buyer’s specific question is usually answered on an inner page, such as a product page, a guide or a pricing page. So if you only check the homepage, you will overrate the site.
Site types are Rubric’s own classification. Blogs and publishers are the only group above the line at the median, which fits sites that are mostly signed, dated articles. Shops and SaaS sites trail. The blog and SaaS groups are small, so treat the gaps as direction, not precision.
Median score by site type
Blogs and publishers are the only group above the 70 line at the median. The blog and SaaS groups are small, so read the gaps as direction. Source: GoGoChimp Rubric crawl of 7 October 2026, scoring version 2026-10-01, up to 40 pages per site.
| Site type | Sites | Median | Below 70 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Blog or publisher | 25 | 74 | 28% |
| General | 126 | 66 | 81% |
| Ecommerce | 73 | 65 | 86% |
| B2B SaaS | 20 | 64 | 85% |
28 of the 299 sites block one or more AI crawlers in robots.txt. 16 of them block at least one crawler that AI search or answer-time fetching relies on, most often PerplexityBot, at 13 sites. The other 12 block only training crawlers, which does not stop AI search. We left all 28 out of the score figures above.
Another 13 sites served our crawler a firewall challenge page instead of content, 11 exposed only their homepage and 3 returned mostly errors. A challenge page has nothing on it to quote, whoever it was meant to stop.
A day earlier, we crawled 415 agency websites with the same engine and the same page cap. They scored a median of 70, with Trusted at 52. That is four points ahead of this corpus, but the gap on trust is the same story: the people who sell search for a living still leave out the signals engines check before they quote.
This is Rubric’s own corpus, not a census of the web. Every site was crawled on the same day with the same rules, so the figures can be compared with each other. These figures replace earlier ones from the same corpus, which mixed scores from an older version of the engine. When we re-crawl, we will date the new figures and keep the old ones alongside. The scoring method is set out in how the score is built.
Chris McCarron founded GoGoChimp in Glasgow in 2013 and has 13 years of conversion rate optimisation experience. He was previously Head of Growth at Roadtrippers and FOMO, and he wrote CITED, a book on getting your business recommended by AI search.
Rubric is GoGoChimp’s AI-citability auditor. It crawls a site the way AI crawlers read it and runs 44 checks across three pillars, Known, Findable and Trusted, weighted for six AI engines: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and Claude.
Rubric predicts citability, it doesn’t count citations. 70 is the quotable line.
Run a free audit to get your own score, your pillar scores, and the list of pages above and below the 70 line. No sign-up, and it takes about two minutes.
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yourstore.com · 26 pages
Citability score
67
3 points below quotable
70 is the quotable line.
By engine
Perplexity
76
Claude
74
ChatGPT
65
Copilot
63
AI Overviews
61
Gemini
57
Do these first
Add Organization schema with sameAs
Name an author on every article
