Every AEO/AI-visibility statistic in NetWebMedia's own marketing used to be stylized — directionally true, never independently measured. We fixed that. This page reports what we actually found when we pointed our own free-audit scoring engine at 460 real business websites, no modeling, no rounding up.
The dead-domain finding
Before scoring anything, we had to fetch it — and 412 of the 927 website addresses we attempted (44%) failed to resolve at all, confirmed against two independent DNS resolvers. This is a DNS observation at that time, not proof that the domain or business has permanently closed. Directory presence does not establish current operating status; the recorded website did not resolve at the time of the check. We excluded every dead domain from the scoring average entirely — it is not counted as a 0, it is not counted at all. The 36/100 average below is measured only across the 460 sites that were actually live and reachable on 2026-09-22.
Where the 460 live sites actually stand
Score distribution across the 460 reachable, scored sites (0-100 scale, higher = more AI-readable):
Not one of the 460 scored 80 or above. The highest score in the entire sample was 70/100.
What's actually missing
Break the score into its five components and the weak spots are consistent and specific — not a vague "needs improvement," a concrete list of what's absent:
45% of the 460 live sites carry zero structured data. This is a measured structural feature, not evidence that those businesses are invisible to AI engines. Engines can read ordinary page text; this heuristic score does not measure actual citations or recommendations.
Provenance and reproducibility limits: these aggregates describe the recorded 2026-09-22 scan of the stated directory-derived corpus, not a representative sample of all Chilean businesses. This page does not publish a row-level dataset, exact directory-source inventory, engine revision or full request log, so independent reproduction of every aggregate is not possible from this page alone. Directory entries may be outdated, duplicate or misclassified. A future reproducible release would need non-sensitive aggregate inputs, source dates, scoring rules/version and exclusion counts; no such public dataset is claimed here.
Methodology
- Sample source: a corpus of 1,080 real businesses catalogued across 17 Chilean cities, spanning NetWebMedia's 14 target industry niches (tourism, restaurants, health, beauty, legal, real estate, automotive, education, events, financial services, home services, wine/agriculture, local specialists, general Business).
- Attempted: 927 of those businesses had a parseable website address on file.
- Scored: 460 addresses returned a live page and were run through the same heuristic AEO-readiness engine behind netwebmedia.com/free-audit.html — no AI model in the loop, pure structural analysis of the served HTML (JSON-LD presence and type, entity/brand signals, word count and heading structure, outbound trust links, dateline/provenance markers).
- Excluded, not zeroed: 467 addresses were left out of every average — 412 for failing DNS resolution on two independent resolvers, the rest for fetch failures, SSL errors, or HTTP error responses. None were scored as 0.
- Date: scan run 2026-09-22. business sites change; this is a snapshot, not a permanent ranking.
- What this does NOT measure: whether ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity would actually recommend a given business in a live conversation. That requires running real buyer-intent queries through a model with live web search — a separate, deeper tier of NetWebMedia's free audit that was not run across this full sample (each run costs real API spend). The scores above are AI-readiness, not AI-recommendation testing.
Cite this
NetWebMedia. "The State of Business AI Visibility, 2026." netwebmedia.com/state-of-smb-ai-visibility-2026.html, September 22, 2026. n=460 scored (927 attempted, 1,080-business corpus).
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