Readiness study · New York City · 2026-08-31
828 of 1,106 New York City businesses publish nothing an AI agent can read.
We read 1,494 business websites in New York City and the area around it on 2026-08-31, as part of a 6,284-business study across 10 industries and 10 areas. 1,106 of them gave us an answer we could assess. 75% of those publish no /llms.txt — the file that exists for one purpose, telling an AI assistant what a business is. Of the 278 that do publish one, almost none of their owners wrote it.
What “New York City” means here
Businesses were found in OpenStreetMap’s open data, filtered to those publishing a website of their own, inside the bounding box 40.5, -74.3, 41, -73.7 — New York City and the area around it. That is the query, not a marketing description of a region, and anyone can re-run it. A business outside that box is not in this page, and its absence is not a finding about it.
388 of the 1,494 could not be assessed for this measure — a server that answered 503 is a server that failed to answer, not a business that publishes nothing — so they are excluded from the percentage rather than counted as absent. Every share on this page is taken over the 1,106 that could be decided.
We checked what a public HTTP GET returns: /llms.txt, three /.well-known/ documents, robots.txt and a sitemap, following each site’s own robots.txt. Nothing was submitted. No page was altered. No business was contacted.
By industry, inside New York City
The same ten industries as the national study, narrowed to this area. A share is printed only where at least 30 businesses in that industry gave an assessable answer here. Below that the counts stand on their own: a percentage over a handful of businesses tells a reader more than we know.
| Industry | Read | Assessable | Publish a file for agents | Share |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Professional services | 252 | 172 | 37 | 22% |
| Self-care | 250 | 183 | 54 | 30% |
| Hospitality | 248 | 183 | 46 | 25% |
| Clinical | 220 | 177 | 30 | 17% |
| Wellness | 197 | 146 | 31 | 21% |
| Trade suppliers | 140 | 102 | 32 | 31% |
| Building trades | 119 | 99 | 25 | 25% |
| Galleries | 34 | 18 | 8 | — |
| Antique dealers | 27 | 20 | 11 | — |
| Events & bridal | 7 | 6 | 4 | — |
Who wrote the files that do exist
Of the New York City businesses whose /llms.txt we could re-read, these name their own author — and the authors are software. This is the finding the national study leads on, and it holds here: presence is arriving as a platform default. Nobody at these businesses decided it.
| Wrote the file | Files in New York City |
|---|---|
| Wix | 73 |
| Shopify | 51 |
| Yoast SEO | 23 |
| All in One SEO | 19 |
| Rank Math | 5 |
| WordPress (unspecified plugin) | 2 |
| other self-declared generator | 1 |
A platform-generated file says what the platform decided to say. It is assembled from the pages and products already on the site. It does not say what the business will quote a price on, which services it actually performs, or the area it will travel to. The business is the subject of the description rather than its author.
What we withdrew, including about businesses here
This study published a column reporting whether each homepage carried organisation data. On 2026-09-03 we proved our own check wrong — it reported the data missing on homepages that publish it — and withdrew the column for every business in the study, including the ones named on this page. We are not publishing a replacement figure, because we know the old one was wrong and we do not know the right one. What happened, in full.
If your business is on this page and something is wrong, we would rather be told than be quoted. Tell us and we will correct it in place with a note saying what changed.
Look up a New York City business
Every one of the 1,494 businesses read here is listed with the facts observed about it: which documents were present, which absent, which could not be read, and which we have withdrawn. No business is scored, graded or ranked. We report what a URL returned on 2026-08-31.
Download the complete dataset as CSV or as JSON — all 6,284 businesses, every area, free to reuse with attribution.
Check your own site instead of reading about it
This page is a reading taken on 2026-08-31. Your site today is a different question, and you can settle it in about eight seconds. Our free check reports the URL and the HTTP status behind every line, so you can open the same address and see the same thing, and it returns unknown rather than missing when it could not read something.
The other areas we read
The same checks, the same day, in nine other places. The national picture is in the full study.
- Alabama 596 of 762 publish nothing for agents (78%)
- Chicago 499 of 695 publish nothing for agents (72%)
- Philadelphia 410 of 551 publish nothing for agents (74%)
- Austin 394 of 533 publish nothing for agents (74%)
- Atlanta 295 of 408 publish nothing for agents (72%)
- New Orleans 191 of 245 publish nothing for agents (78%)
- Nashville 172 of 242 publish nothing for agents (71%)
- Charlotte 165 of 229 publish nothing for agents (72%)
- Memphis 64 of 85 publish nothing for agents (75%)
Cite this
River Cade Concepts, Agent presence among 6,284 small businesses, 2026-08-31. New York City subset: 1,494 businesses. https://rivercadeconcepts.com/reports/agent-presence/newyork
Reuse the data and the findings freely, with attribution. If you quote a percentage, quote the sample it was taken over with it — that is the whole discipline this study is built on, and we have already published one correction for breaking it ourselves.