AI search visibility: what 858,457 small business websites tell us

Source: Duda, The State of Local AEO for SMBs and Their Agencies, April 2026. https://www.duda.co/knowledge/2026-ai-visibility-aeo-report

If tools like ChatGPT and Google's AI Overviews never read your website, you are losing customers you will never hear about. Duda studied 858,457 small business websites. The ones AI crawlers visited got 3.2 times more visitors, 2.7 times more enquiry forms and 2.5 times more phone calls than the ones they skipped.

What did Duda actually study?

Duda looked at 858,457 small business websites and 69 million AI crawler visits during February 2026, then worked out what the visited sites had in common.

An AI crawler is a bot that reads your website on behalf of a tool like ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google's AI Overviews. It is not the same as Google's search bot, and it does not visit every website.

One thing you should know up front. Kangaroo UK is a Duda Solution Partner, so this is our own platform's research. We have set out what we think it does and does not prove near the end of this page, and we would rather you read that part than take the headline on trust.

Why does it matter whether AI reads your website?

Because the businesses these tools read about are the businesses they recommend, and the business they recommend gets the call.

In the study, the websites AI crawlers visited saw:

• 
  3.2 times more visitors
• 2.7 times more enquiry forms completed
• 2.5 times more people tapping the phone number

None of that is about rankings. It is about whether the person asking "who is the best plumber near me" hears your name or your competitor's.

If you want the background first, start with what AEO is and how it differs from SEO.

What makes AI tools read a small business website?

Seven things, and Duda measured how much each one lifts the chance of being crawled. The lift is shown in percentage points, so "+34pp" means the crawl rate rose by 34 points, not by 34%.

1. A synced Google Business Profile with matching name, address and phone number, +34pp. The single biggest lever, and the cheapest. Your details must match everywhere they appear. How we handle listings.
2. Booking functionality on the site, +30pp. Let people book, not just enquire.
3. Customer reviews on the page, +21pp to +31pp. Reviews on the site itself, not only on Google. How we manage reviews.
4. Local schema markup, +17pp. Code in the background that tells machines who you are, where you are and what you sell. What local business schema is.
5. Dynamic or templated pages, +11pp. Useful if you serve many towns or many services.
6. A blog. Each extra post lifted AI crawler visits by a median 7%.
7. More pages. Each extra page lifted them by a median 4%.

The important finding is that they stack. Sites with a blog, local schema, a synced Google Business Profile and pages built for each service or location were crawled 400% more than the typical site on the platform. Doing four things beats doing one of them well.

There is a pattern underneath all five. These tools reward businesses that say exactly what they do and exactly where they do it. Vagueness is what gets skipped.

"The businesses I speak to think AI search is something they will deal with next year. The gap in this data is between sites that answer questions clearly and sites that do not, and that gap is already open. Most of it closes with an afternoon's work on the basics."

Peter Jones, Commercial Director, Kangaroo UK

What should you do first?

Work down this list. Cheapest and highest impact first.

1. Claim and complete your Google Business Profile, then make your name, address and phone number identical on your website, your profile and every directory you appear in.
2. Put your reviews on your own website, not just on Google.
3. Add local schema so machines can read your business details.
4. Add online booking, if your customers would use it.
5. Write a proper page for each service you offer and each town you serve, and say plainly what you actually do.

Most of that is an afternoon's work, and you can do it yourself. There is no magic tool involved and nobody needs to rebuild your website to make it happen. If you would rather someone else handled it, that is what we are here for.

What this research does not tell you

Four honest caveats, because these figures are being repeated everywhere without them.

It shows a link, not a cause. As far as we can tell from what has been published, the study compares two groups of websites in the same month, rather than following the same website before and after. Sites that AI crawlers visit tend to be better built to begin with, and better sites win more enquiries anyway. The research cannot separate those two things, and neither can we.

It is one platform's data. These are 858,457 websites built on Duda, not the whole web. The pattern may well hold more widely. It has not been shown to.

The headline number is quoted two different ways. Duda's own announcement is titled "3.2X more traffic" while the text on the same page, and on the report itself, says "320% more". Those are not the same thing. A 320% increase would be more than four times the traffic. We have used the smaller reading throughout, because we would rather understate it than oversell it.

AI visibility is hard to measure. No tool sees every mention across every assistant. Anyone who tells you they can track all of it precisely is overselling. What you can do is ask the tools the questions your customers ask, and write down what comes back.



Frequently asked questions

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We will check what ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews say about your business, and tell you what to fix first.