Every month, our research programme reads more than 3,200 UK company websites the way an AI system does, scores what it finds, and publishes the results. It covers 19 industry benchmarks, from the FTSE 100 and ecommerce to law, travel, property, healthcare and manufacturing. We built it in Bristol, it is free to read, and I want to explain what it measures and why a business anywhere in the South West should care.

Why measure AI readability at all

Buyers have started asking AI assistants for recommendations and receiving written answers instead of lists of links. Those answers are assembled from websites the AI systems could actually fetch, parse and trust. Which meant a question nobody could answer when we started: how readable are British company websites to the machines now doing the recommending? Opinion was everywhere. Measurement was nowhere. So we built the instrument.

What The Crane Index actually measures

Each site gets three machine reads. Retrieval asks whether an AI system can fetch the site and extract its meaning: the facts in the code, the structured data, the clarity of what this business is. Execution asks how the site behaves when automated agents call: whether they are served, throttled or turned away at the door. Representation asks whether the machine’s picture of the business matches reality across the open web: consistent identity, verifiable credentials, links that hold up. The three reads combine into a composite score, and each industry’s table is published with every figure measured on a stated date.

The rules we hold ourselves to

Nothing is estimated. If a read could not be completed, it is reported as unmeasured rather than guessed, and no composite is published for it. Equal scores are published as joint standings rather than split by a tiebreak. And the whole programme re-runs monthly, so a standing is a dated fact rather than a permanent badge. Sites move up when they improve and down when they decay, which is precisely what makes the record worth watching. A subscription cannot alter a public score; the research is editorially independent of anything we sell.

What it means for a business in Bristol or Bath

The companies in the benchmarks are household names, but the findings transfer directly to any business. The characteristics that make a FTSE 100 site readable to AI are the same ones that decide whether a Bristol firm gets cited when someone asks an assistant for a recommendation: facts in the code, doors open to agents, an identity that checks out. None of them require a famous brand. Most of them are fixable in weeks, and because the reads are measurements rather than opinions, you can prove the fix landed.

Where to look first

The full tables are free at our research library, industry by industry. If you want the same three reads run on your own site, the scanner is free too and takes about a minute. And I write up what the measurements are teaching us each week in The Crane Standard, published every Tuesday morning. British businesses spent twenty years learning to be visible to Google. The next few years are about being legible to the systems that answer on Google’s behalf, and the ones treating that as a measurement problem are already pulling ahead.

Nic Crane is the founder of The Crane Consultancy, the Bristol built practice behind The Crane Index, working with businesses across the South West on AI search, paid media and technical SEO.

About The Crane Consultancy

Senior-led paid media, technical SEO, and web analytics. Removing agency fluff and junior hand-offs by having senior practitioners handle strategy, code, and platform execution directly.