AI readiness index

# The Census

Every quarter we run the same scan, unchanged, across the same groups of organizations: state governments, universities, the largest nonprofits, health systems, the S&P 500, and a hundred sites each on Drupal and WordPress. Nobody asks us to. Nobody pays for it.

We want to know what the web actually looks like to a machine trying to read it — at a size where one badly built site can't move the answer.

## Census Q4 2026

Complete

929 of 1,000 organizations scored. 71 we couldn't reach.

7 cohorts

Index 11.0, in effect September 24, 2026

[See the Q4 2026 Census](https://readinessindex.io/census/2026-Q4)

What it will tell you

How common a failure is across a whole sector. How many state portals block AI crawlers outright. How many university sites publish machine-readable licensing. Whether a Drupal site is measurably better prepared than average.

Those are claims about a population, and 1,000 organizations can carry them.

What it won't tell you

That one organization is better than another. Two sites can differ in which tests apply to them at all, and we renormalize the scores so they stay comparable. A four-point gap between two named sites is noise.

That's why we publish the spread around every number.

The cohorts

## Who we scan, and where each list comes from

Cohort

Drawn from

Sites

Score

[state-portals The primary web portal of each US state government.  Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) 50 of 50      median 38.0](https://readinessindex.io/census/2026-Q4/state-portals)

[universities The 100 largest US universities by total enrollment.  National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) 94 of 100      median 42.0](https://readinessindex.io/census/2026-Q4/universities)

[health-systems The 50 largest US nonprofit health systems by total revenue.  Internal Revenue Service (IRS), with Wikidata 46 of 50      median 38.5](https://readinessindex.io/census/2026-Q4/health-systems)

[nonprofits The 100 largest US nonprofits by total revenue.  Internal Revenue Service (IRS) 93 of 100      median 39.0](https://readinessindex.io/census/2026-Q4/nonprofits)

[sp500 The 500 companies in the S&P 500.  Wikipedia contributors 463 of 500      median 41.0](https://readinessindex.io/census/2026-Q4/sp500)

[wordpress-100 The 100 highest-ranked WordPress sites in the Tranco list.  Tranco (Le Pochat et al., NDSS 2019) 90 of 100      median 47.5](https://readinessindex.io/census/2026-Q4/wordpress-100)

[drupal-100 The 100 highest-ranked Drupal sites in the Tranco list.  Tranco (Le Pochat et al., NDSS 2019) 93 of 100      median 45.0](https://readinessindex.io/census/2026-Q4/drupal-100)

All cohorts

929 of 1,000 sites scanned

929 of 1,000

median 42.0

[Open the Q4 2026 results →](https://readinessindex.io/census/2026-Q4)

How to check us

## A finding nobody can check is an opinion

We modeled this on the [WebAIM Million](https://webaim.org/projects/million/), which has done the same thing for accessibility since 2019 and changed what our industry argues about by doing it. Our findings are aggregate. The dataset underneath them is public, named, with the hash of every result.

[The Census methodology](https://readinessindex.io/census/methodology)

How we chose the sites, how many pages of each we read, how hard we crawled, and why we scan organizations that never asked us to.

[The Index itself](https://readinessindex.io/open-standard)

What a score means. Version 11.0. Every result records the version and date it was scored against, so a standard that moves can't quietly rewrite an old finding.

[All the tests](https://readinessindex.io/tests)

The same list we measure your own site against. One standard, no special cases for the Census.

[AIRBot](https://readinessindex.io/bot)

The crawler that does the reading. What it fetches, how fast it goes, and how to turn it off.

Scanned without being asked?

If your organization is in a cohort and you'd rather we didn't read it, [AIRBot honors robots.txt](https://readinessindex.io/bot). We'll record that you opted out rather than quietly dropping you from the count.
