Four perfect scores, four pages that are blank to crawlers. How 26 SaaS homepages read to ChatGPT and AI answers, and the three fixes that separate the top from the rest.
Earlier today we published how 96 Indian D2C stores read to AI search. Shopify gave those stores a solid, similar floor: a median of 75 and a narrow spread. SaaS homepages are built every which way, so we expected a wider range. We got one.
We ran 27 SaaS homepages through the same AI search check: sixteen checks of how well ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Google's AI answers can read a page. One site's bot protection turned the checker away, which leaves 26. They are mostly companies whose founders are active on LinkedIn, in the US and Europe: a handpicked list, not a random sample of SaaS.
The scores
Median 77.5, a little above the D2C stores.
Four perfect 100s. No D2C store got above 91.
Four pages that are close to blank. They send 50 words of HTML or fewer before JavaScript runs.
13 of 26 under 80.
The top of the table
Scores as of 17 October 2026. Each links to a live re-check.
The four perfect scores share a pattern (and one of them, Sitefire, works on AI search visibility for a living): about a thousand words of plain HTML, the company and the product both described in structured data, an FAQ marked up for machines, and an llms.txt. Nothing exotic. Every item is a day's work or less.
What separates the top from the rest
1. A page that is only JavaScript. Four homepages send almost no text in their HTML: the page is built in the browser. Many AI crawlers don't run JavaScript, so to them the page is empty, however good it looks. Server rendering or static generation fixes it, and most modern frameworks do it out of the box once it's switched on.
2. Nothing says who you are or what you sell. 11 of 26 have no Organization in their structured data, and 14 don't describe the product either. A model then has to guess what the company is from scattered text, and a guess is how you end up described by a competitor's comparison page instead of your own.
3. No FAQ. 16 of 26 have none. A buyer's questions ("Does it work with HubSpot?", "Is there a free plan?") answered in a sentence each are the easiest thing for an AI answer to quote.
Then the cheap ones. 14 of 26 have no llms.txt, where Shopify stores get one for free; SaaS sites have to write their own, and it takes an hour. Four have no sitemap.
D2C and SaaS side by side
D2C stores (96)
SaaS homepages (26)
Median score
75
77.5
Best
91
100
Under 80
74%
50%
Serve an llms.txt
92%
46%
No FAQ
74%
62%
The platform sets the floor. Shopify stores all start in the same place and few rise far above it. A custom-built SaaS site can reach 100, or ship a page AI crawlers can't read at all.
What this does and doesn't say
This measures how readable a homepage is to AI search, not whether ChatGPT recommends the product. Readable is the part you control on your own site; being recommended also depends on what review sites, comparison posts and communities say about you.