E-commerce: how AI-ready are the leaders?
Marketplaces and retailers competing for product recommendations in AI answers. We ran the LLMready crawler against each homepage and scored it the same way as a free audit.
61/100
Median (all industries: 77)
13%
Publish an llms.txt
38%
Allow all 4 core AI crawlers
50%
Use Schema.org JSON-LD
Key findings
- IKEA leads with 79/100 (C+); Best Buy trails at 29.
- The e-commerce median is 16 points below the median of all 102 sites we measured.
- 2 of 8 block at least one core AI crawler (GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot or Google-Extended) in robots.txt.
- 13% publish an llms.txt and 0% an llms-full.txt. 25% rely on JavaScript to render their main text.
- Weakest category on average: bot access at 46/100.
Bot access
46
Content extractability
68
Semantic metadata
66
Citation readiness
51
Scores
Leaderboard
| # | Site | Score | Bot access | Extractability | Metadata | Citation | Core bots | llms.txt | Biggest gap |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 79 IKEAikea.com | 79 C+ | 76 | 87 | 92 | 64 | llms.txt is present and valid | ||
| 2 | 76 Nikenike.com | 76 C | 76 | 84 | 92 | 56 | llms.txt is present and valid | ||
| 3 | 68 Targettarget.com | 68 D | 64 | 87 | 82 | 43 | Clear entity identity | ||
| 4 | 66 Walmartwalmart.com | 66 D | 46 | 77 | 85 | 65 | llms.txt is present and valid | ||
| 5 | 55 Wayfairwayfair.com | 55 F | 76 | 37 | 62 | 41 | Content is in the initial HTML | ||
| 6 | 41 Amazonamazon.com | 41 F | 12 | 62 | 43 | 52 | 4 | llms.txt is present and valid | |
| 7 | 40 Zalandozalando.com | 40 F | 21 | 48 | 38 | 57 | 3 | Content is in the initial HTML | |
| 8 | 29 Best Buybestbuy.com | 29 F | 0 | 60 | 30 | 32 | llms.txt is present and valid |
Not scored because they turned away our crawler: Etsy (blocked automated requests (HTTP 403)), bol. (blocked automated requests (HTTP 403)), eBay (blocked automated requests (HTTP 403)), ASOS (didn't respond in time).
Most common gaps
Where e-commerce sites lose points
Answer-ready formats
100%8 of 8 sites · Citation readiness
Add an FAQ section (with FAQPage schema) and question-style headings that mirror real queries.
Authorship and freshness
100%8 of 8 sites · Citation readiness
Show an author and published/updated dates (in markup and JSON-LD).
Content density
100%8 of 8 sites · Content extractability
Trim inline scripts, styles and markup bloat so text makes up a larger share of the page.
llms-full.txt is available
100%8 of 8 sites · Bot access
Publish the generated llms-full.txt alongside llms.txt.
Relevant schema types
100%8 of 8 sites · Semantic metadata
Clear entity identity
88%7 of 8 sites · Citation readiness
Add Organization JSON-LD with name, logo and sameAs links to your official profiles.
Where would your site rank?
Run the same audit on your site and compare it to the e-commerce median of 61.
A high score means AI engines can reach, read and understand a site. It doesn't guarantee citations — those also depend on authority, relevance and the question being asked.