US Cities (Top 1,000)
cities-1000
The 1,000 most populous US cities.
Median score
28
across 974 sites
Middle half
28–33
spread around the median
Full range
28–65
lowest to highest
Gated
926 of 974
block AI crawlers outright
Middle of 14 cohorts. All cohorts 50 · best cohort 58.
Where this list came from
The source, and how we filtered it
| Source | The 1,000 most populous US cities, Census Vintage 2025, US Census Bureau, with CISA and Wikidata (2025-vintage) |
|---|---|
| License | No restriction on the combined list. The roster is a work of the US federal government and carries no copyright, the CISA .gov registry is public domain, and Wikidata is CC0 1.0 Universal; the cohort goes out under the Census's CC BY-SA 4.0 like the rest. |
| How we filtered it | The roster is the Census Bureau's Vintage 2025 subcounty estimates (sub-est2025.csv) with SUMLEV 162, 19,483 incorporated places, sorted by POPESTIMATE2025 and cut at 1,000. The cutoff is a population of 41,319 (Friendswood, Texas), because the top thousand is not reproducible and a threshold is. Each city's address came from the CISA .gov registry, then Wikidata (P856, joined on the place FIPS code in P774), and 19 were resolved by hand and confirmed by loading the site. |
| Built | 2026-10-11 |
The filtering is ours and is disclosed as ours. The source published a list; the decision about which rows of it belong in a cohort was a judgment call, and it is written down so somebody can disagree with it.
Distribution
Where the 974 sites land
| Grade | Share of the cohort | Sites | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Not ready | 887 | 91.1% | |
| Weak | 80 | 8.2% | |
| Adequate | 7 | 0.7% |
By dimension
What the cohort earns, dimension by dimension
The mean share of each dimension’s available points that this cohort earned. Low here means the whole sector is weak on it, not that one site dragged an average down. The per-site spread is in the dataset.
| Dimension | Mean share earned | Mean |
|---|---|---|
| #1 · Reach
These parameters determine the fundamental ease of access that AI has to your site information. |
46% | |
| #2 · Read
AI generally turns off JavaScript. Does your site information survive without it? |
22% | |
| #3 · Understand
Does a machine know who and what you are? |
19% | |
| #4 · Act
Sitemaps, redirects, 404s, licensing terms, and not wasting the crawl budget. |
72% |
How much of each site we read
The cap is 32 URLs and it is a ceiling, not a promise. A portal whose every link points at a different host yields one page; a university yields the full sample. The median here is 1, the range 1–32, published so that "we sampled 32 URLs per site" cannot become a claim the data does not support.
4 sites in this cohort served a certificate we could not verify. They were read anyway and scored normally, because reporting no response for a site every browser loads would describe our TLS stack rather than the site, and each one carries the finding in its row.
Where this cohort fails
14 tests almost nobody in this cohort passes
Universal — nobody passes these
| Test | What it asks | Failing | Of | Points |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| EXT-11 | Have you marked the part of a page that answers a spoken question? | 974 | 0 | |
| EXT-12 | Do you tell search engines the moment a page changes? | 974 | 0 | |
| EXT-14 | Does your site offer its actions to AI browsers as tools? | 713 | 0 | |
| EXT-16 | Do you publish a card or a skills list for the agents you run? | 974 | 0 | |
| EXT-17 | Do you list your agents in your domain's DNS records? | 893 | 0 | |
| EXT-18 | Do you tell AI shoppers how they can pay? | 1 | 0 | |
| EXT-2 | Do you list your APIs and agent tools where agents look for them? | 5 | 0 | |
| EXT-7 | If you run real question-and-answer pages, are they marked as such? | 16 | 0 | |
| PST-2 | Have you posted a Content Signals statement about what AI may do with your content? | 974 | 0 | |
| RED-11 | Does each page tell machines where its Markdown copy is? | 1 | 1 | |
| RED-12 | If a machine asks for Markdown, does your site give it? | 974 | 2 | |
| UND-1 | Does your site say clearly who you are? | 974 | 2 | |
| UND-10 | Does your page code link to your official profiles elsewhere? | 974 | 2 | |
| UND-2 | Does your site use the page labels that search engines still read for what you publish? | 974 | 3 |
Near-universal — 95% and above
| Test | What it asks | Failing | Of | Points |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| EXT-1 | Do you publish an llms.txt file for coding assistants? | 974 | 0 | |
| EXT-13 | Can an assistant ask your site a question directly? | 974 | 0 | |
| PST-4 | Have you reserved your text and data mining rights in a form machines can read? | 974 | 0 | |
| EXT-4 | Can an AI assistant connect to your site as a tool? | 974 | 0 | |
| UND-6 | Are your published and updated dates honest and visible? | 974 | 6 | |
| EXT-5 | Is your page code one connected description of your organization? | 974 | 0 | |
| RCH-3 | Does each page say which web address is the real one? | 974 | 2 | |
| RED-10 | Do you offer a plain-text (Markdown) copy of your pages? | 76 | 2 | |
| RED-13 | Is the page built from real page parts, like header, main and navigation? | 974 | 1 | |
| MSR-7 | Are you set up in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, and do you read their AI reports? | 974 | 0 | |
| RED-5 | Do your PDFs and images have their own rules for search and quoting? | 77 | 1 | |
| UND-5 | Does the author label in your page code point to that person? | 60 | 1 | |
| RED-3 | Can a crawler trust the 'last changed' dates in your sitemap? | 974 | 2 | |
| RED-8 | Do you have sitemaps for your images and videos? | 974 | 1 | |
| RCH-2 | Does your website let those crawlers in, or does your security turn them away? | 974 | 12 |
Common — 90 to 95%
Coral bars mark tests worth 2 points or more, the failures that actually move a score.
Every site
Every 1,000, named, with a report for each
Whether or not it has been scanned. Rows with no website on record, sites that were unreachable and sites that turned us away stay in the table with the reason on them, and none of them enters an average: dropping them would shrink the population to the part that was easy to measure. A few points between two neighbors is noise. The box filters every row in the cohort, not only the page you are on; click a header to sort the rows on this page by name or by score.
Showing 201–300 of 1,000 · page 3 of 10
| Site | Score | Gated | Pages read | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Round Rock, Texas roundrocktexas.govregistered as City of Round Rock, Texas in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Jackson, Mississippi jacksonms.govregistered as City of Jackson in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Stamford, Connecticut stamfordct.govregistered as City of Stamford in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Lewisville, Texas cityoflewisvilletx.govregistered as City of Lewisville in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Coral Springs, Florida coralsprings.govregistered as City of Coral Springs in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| New Haven, Connecticut newhavenct.govregistered as City of New Haven Connecticut in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Fullerton, California fullertonca.govregistered as City of Fullerton in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Torrance, California torranceca.govregistered as City Of Torrance in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Orange, California orangeca.govregistered as City of Orange in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Cedar Rapids, Iowa cedar-rapids.orgweb address from Wikidata (P856), not the .gov registry | 53 | Gated | 32 | |
| West Valley City, Utah wvc-ut.govregistered as City of West Valley in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Hampton, Virginia hampton.govregistered as City of Hampton in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Warren, Michigan warrenmi.govregistered as City of Warren in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Dayton, Ohio daytonohio.govregistered as City of Dayton in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Fargo, North Dakota fargond.govregistered as City of Fargo in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Pasadena, California pasadena.govregistered as City of Pasadena in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Kent, Washington kentwa.govregistered as City of Kent in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Carrollton, Texas carrolltontx.govregistered as City of Carrollton in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Sterling Heights, Michigan sterlingheights.govregistered as City of Sterling Heights in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Santa Clara, California santaclaraca.govregistered as City of Santa Clara in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Abilene, Texas abilenetx.govregistered as City of Abilene in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Norman, Oklahoma normanok.govregistered as City of Norman in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Columbia, Missouri como.govregistered as City of Columbia, Missouri in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Pearland, Texas pearlandtx.govregistered as City of Pearland in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Clovis, California clovisca.govregistered as City of Clovis in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| North Charleston, South Carolina northcharlestonsc.govregistered as City of North Charleston in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Athens-Clarke County, Georgia accgov.comweb address from Wikidata (P856), not the .gov registry; a consolidated city-county government | 48 | No | 12 | |
| College Station, Texas cstx.govregistered as City of College Station in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| West Palm Beach, Florida wpb.orgweb address from Wikidata (P856), not the .gov registry | 42 | Gated | 32 | |
| Wilmington, North Carolina wilmingtonnc.govregistered as City of Wilmington in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Allentown, Pennsylvania allentownpa.govregistered as City of Allentown in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Topeka, Kansas topeka.govregistered as City of Topeka in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Lakeland, Florida lakelandfl.govregistered as City of Lakeland Florida in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Buckeye, Arizona buckeyeaz.govregistered as City of Buckeye in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Goodyear, Arizona goodyearaz.govregistered as City of Goodyear in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Broken Arrow, Oklahoma brokenarrowok.govregistered as City of Broken Arrow in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Simi Valley, California simivalley.govregistered as City of Simi Valley in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Rochester, Minnesota rochestermn.govregistered as The City of Rochester in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Lafayette, Louisiana lafayettela.govLafayette Consolidated Government, verified by fetching the site; a consolidated city-county government | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Vallejo, California vallejo.govregistered as City of Vallejo in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Concord, California cityofconcord.orgweb address from Wikidata (P856), not the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Arvada, Colorado arvadaco.govregistered as City of Arvada in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Odessa, Texas odessa-tx.govregistered as City of Odessa in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Cambridge, Massachusetts cambridgema.govregistered as City of Cambridge, Ma in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| New Braunfels, Texas newbraunfels.govregistered as City of New Braunfels in the .gov registry | 48 | No | 1 | |
| Fairfield, California fairfield.ca.govweb address from Wikidata (P856), not the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Ann Arbor, Michigan a2gov.orgweb address from Wikidata (P856), not the .gov registry | 50 | Gated | 32 | |
| Thousand Oaks, California toaks.govregistered as City of Thousand Oaks in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Hartford, Connecticut hartford.govweb address from Wikidata (P856), not the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Berkeley, California berkeleyca.govregistered as City of Berkeley in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Independence, Missouri independencemo.govregistered as City of Independence Missouri in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Billings, Montana billingsmt.govregistered as City of Billings in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| High Point, North Carolina highpointnc.govregistered as City of High Point in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Nampa, Idaho nampa.govregistered as City of Nampa in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Lowell, Massachusetts lowellma.govregistered as City of Lowell, Massachusetts in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| League City, Texas leaguecitytx.govregistered as City of League City in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Conroe, Texas cityofconroe.govregistered as City of Conroe in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Antioch, California antiochca.govregistered as City of Antioch in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Menifee, California cityofmenifee.usweb address from Wikidata (P856), not the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Richardson, Texas cor.govregistered as City of Richardson Texas in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Pompano Beach, Florida pompanobeachfl.govregistered as City of Pompano Beach in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Las Cruces, New Mexico lascruces.govregistered as City of Las Cruces in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Manchester, New Hampshire manchesternh.govregistered as City of Manchester NH in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| West Jordan, Utah westjordan.utah.govweb address from Wikidata (P856), not the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Westminster, Colorado westminsterco.govregistered as CITY OF WESTMINSTER in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Evansville, Indiana evansvillegov.orgunreachableweb address from Wikidata (P856), not the .gov registry | — | No | — | |
| Waterbury, Connecticut waterburyct.govregistered as City of Waterbury in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Elgin, Illinois elginil.govregistered as City of Elgin, Illinois in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Greeley, Colorado greeleyco.govregistered as City of Greeley in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Temecula, California temeculaca.govregistered as City of Temecula in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Richmond, California richmondca.govregistered as City of Richmond in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Concord, North Carolina concordnc.govregistered as City of Concord in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Provo, Utah provo.govregistered as Provo City in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Rio Rancho, New Mexico rioranchonm.govregistered as City of Rio Rancho in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Clearwater, Florida clearwaterfl.govregistered as City of Clearwater in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Tuscaloosa, Alabama tuscaloosa-al.govregistered as City of Tuscaloosa, AL in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Murrieta, California murrietaca.govregistered as City of Murrieta in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Lansing, Michigan lansingmi.govregistered as City of Lansing - Information Technology in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Tyler, Texas tylertexas.govregistered as City of Tyler in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Miami Gardens, Florida miamigardens-fl.govregistered as City of Miami Gardens in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Everett, Washington everettwa.govregistered as City of Everett in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Allen, Texas allentx.govregistered as City of Allen in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Springfield, Illinois springfield.il.usweb address from Wikidata (P856), not the .gov registry | 45 | No | 29 | |
| Beaumont, Texas beaumonttexas.govregistered as City of Beaumont in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| South Fulton, Georgia cityofsouthfultonga.govregistered as City of South Fulton in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Carlsbad, California carlsbadca.govregistered as City of Carlsbad in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Sparks, Nevada sparksnv.govregistered as City of Sparks in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Gresham, Oregon greshamoregon.govregistered as City of Gresham in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Santa Maria, California cityofsantamariaca.govregistered as City of Santa Maria, CA in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Hillsboro, Oregon hillsboro-oregon.govregistered as City of Hillsboro in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Peoria, Illinois peoriail.govregistered as City of Peoria in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Davie, Florida davie-fl.govregistered as Town of Davie in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Edinburg, Texas cityofedinburg.comweb address from Wikidata (P856), not the .gov registry | 48 | No | 1 | |
| Pueblo, Colorado pueblo.usCity of Pueblo, verified by fetching the site | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| San Buenaventura (Ventura), California cityofventura.ca.govweb address from Wikidata (P856), not the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Palm Coast, Florida palmcoast.govregistered as City of Palm Coast in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Costa Mesa, California costamesaca.govregistered as City of Costa Mesa in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| St. George, Utah sgcityutah.govregistered as City of St. George in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Centennial, Colorado centennialco.govregistered as CIty of Centennial in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Downey, California downeyca.orgblockedweb address from Wikidata (P856), not the .gov registry; not measured: HTTP 403 (Akamai) | — | No | — |
Scores are for the population, not for ranking two named sites against each other. A few points between neighbors is noise. See what these numbers can and cannot support. Data: sites.csv · checks.csv · summary.json