Education: how AI-ready are the leaders?
Learning platforms competing for “best course for…” questions. We ran the LLMready crawler against each homepage and scored it the same way as a free audit.
71/100
Median (all industries: 77)
43%
Publish an llms.txt
86%
Allow all 4 core AI crawlers
43%
Use Schema.org JSON-LD
Key findings
- Coursera leads with 85/100 (B); Khan Academy trails at 41.
- The education median is 6 points below the median of all 102 sites we measured.
- 0 of 7 block at least one core AI crawler (GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot or Google-Extended) in robots.txt.
- 43% publish an llms.txt and 0% an llms-full.txt. 14% rely on JavaScript to render their main text.
- Weakest category on average: citation readiness at 53/100.
Bot access
76
Content extractability
62
Semantic metadata
64
Citation readiness
53
Scores
Leaderboard
| # | Site | Score | Bot access | Extractability | Metadata | Citation | Core bots | llms.txt | Biggest gap |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 85 Courseracoursera.org | 85 B | 94 | 77 | 91 | 76 | Authorship and freshness | ||
| 2 | 79 edXedx.org | 79 C+ | 90 | 69 | 86 | 70 | Answer-ready formats | ||
| 3 | 76 Codecademycodecademy.com | 76 C | 76 | 78 | 92 | 62 | llms.txt is present and valid | ||
| 4 | 71 Brilliantbrilliant.org | 71 C- | 90 | 81 | 67 | 43 | Schema.org JSON-LD | ||
| 5 | 50 Duolingoduolingo.com | 50 F | 76 | 30 | 59 | 31 | Content is in the initial HTML | ||
| 6 | 48 Cheggchegg.com | 48 F | 40 | 61 | 34 | 55 | llms.txt is present and valid | ||
| 7 | 41 Khan Academykhanacademy.org | 41 F | 67 | 39 | 18 | 31 | llms.txt is present and valid |
Not scored because they turned away our crawler: Udemy (blocked automated requests (HTTP 403)), Skillshare (blocked automated requests (HTTP 403)), MasterClass (blocked automated requests (HTTP 403)), Quizlet (blocked automated requests (HTTP 403)), DataCamp (blocked automated requests (HTTP 403)).
Most common gaps
Where education sites lose points
Answer-ready formats
100%7 of 7 sites · Citation readiness
Add an FAQ section (with FAQPage schema) and question-style headings that mirror real queries.
Authorship and freshness
100%7 of 7 sites · Citation readiness
Show an author and published/updated dates (in markup and JSON-LD).
Content density
100%7 of 7 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%7 of 7 sites · Bot access
Publish the generated llms-full.txt alongside llms.txt.
Relevant schema types
100%7 of 7 sites · Semantic metadata
Factual density
86%6 of 7 sites · Citation readiness
Where would your site rank?
Run the same audit on your site and compare it to the education median of 71.
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.