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 401–500 of 1,000 · page 5 of 10
| Site | Score | Gated | Pages read | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Deerfield Beach, Florida deerfieldbeachfl.govregistered as City of Deerfield Beach in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Lawrence, Massachusetts cityoflawrence.comweb address from Wikidata (P856), not the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Bloomington, Minnesota bloomingtonmn.govregistered as City of Bloomington in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Danbury, Connecticut danbury-ct.govregistered as City of Danbury in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Mission, Texas missiontexas.usweb address from Wikidata (P856), not the .gov registry | 31 | Gated | 16 | |
| Westminster, California westminster-ca.govregistered as City of Westminster in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Troy, Michigan troymi.govregistered as City of Troy in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Daytona Beach, Florida daytonabeach.govregistered as City of Daytona Beach in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Kennewick, Washington go2kennewick.comweb address from Wikidata (P856), not the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Duluth, Minnesota duluthmn.govregistered as City of Duluth in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Waukegan, Illinois waukeganil.govregistered as City of Waukegan in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Warner Robins, Georgia warnerrobinsga.govregistered as City of Warner Robins in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| South Jordan, Utah southjordanutah.govregistered as South Jordan City in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Rancho Cordova, California cityofranchocordova.govregistered as City of Rancho Cordova in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Melbourne, Florida melbourneflorida.orgweb address from Wikidata (P856), not the .gov registry | 43 | Gated | 32 | |
| Gastonia, North Carolina gastonianc.govregistered as City of Gastonia, North Carolina in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Baytown, Texas baytown.orgweb address from Wikidata (P856), not the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Medford, Oregon medfordoregon.govregistered as City of Medford, Oregon in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Santa Barbara, California santabarbaraca.govregistered as City of Santa Barbara in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Sioux City, Iowa sioux-city.orgblockedweb address from Wikidata (P856), not the .gov registry; not measured: HTTP 429 (Cloudflare) | — | No | — | |
| Citrus Heights, California citrusheights.govregistered as City of Citrus Heights in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Lake Forest, California lakeforestca.govregistered as City of Lake Forest in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Auburn, Washington auburnwa.govregistered as City of Auburn in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Homestead, Florida homesteadfl.govregistered as City of Homestead in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| San Ramon, California sanramon.ca.govweb address from Wikidata (P856), not the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| New Rochelle, New York newrochelleny.govregistered as City of New Rochelle in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Whittier, California cityofwhittier.govregistered as City of Whittier in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Kissimmee, Florida kissimmee.govregistered as City of Kissimmee in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Mountain View, California mountainview.govregistered as City of Mountain View in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| San Leandro, California sanleandro.govregistered as City of San Leandro in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Layton, Utah laytoncityutah.govregistered as Layton City Corporation in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Auburn, Alabama auburnal.govregistered as City of Auburn, AL in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Cranston, Rhode Island cranstonri.govregistered as City of Cranston in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Mansfield, Texas mansfield-tx.govregistered as City of Mansfield in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Somerville, Massachusetts somervillema.govregistered as City of Somerville in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Warwick, Rhode Island warwickri.govregistered as City of Warwick in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Castle Rock, Colorado townofcastlerock.orgweb address from Wikidata (P856), not the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Brooklyn Park, Minnesota brooklynparkmn.govregistered as City of Brooklyn Park in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Livermore, California livermoreca.govregistered as City of Livermore in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Bloomington, Indiana bloomington.in.govweb address from Wikidata (P856), not the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Jonesboro, Arkansas jonesboroar.govregistered as City of Jonesboro in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Farmington Hills, Michigan fhgov.comweb address from Wikidata (P856), not the .gov registry | 62 | No | 31 | |
| Perris, California cityofperris.govregistered as City of Perris in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Longview, Texas longviewtx.govregistered as City of Longview, TX in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Pasco, Washington pasco-wa.govregistered as City of Pasco in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Hawthorne, California hawthorneca.govregistered as City of Hawthorne in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Lake Charles, Louisiana cityoflakecharles.comweb address from Wikidata (P856), not the .gov registry | 35 | Gated | 17 | |
| Redmond, Washington redmond.govregistered as City of Redmond in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Boynton Beach, Florida boynton-beach.orgweb address from Wikidata (P856), not the .gov registry | 45 | No | 7 | |
| Westland, Michigan cityofwestland.comweb address from Wikidata (P856), not the .gov registry | 41 | No | 19 | |
| Redwood City, California redwoodcity.govregistered as City of Redwood City in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Newport Beach, California newportbeachca.govregistered as City of Newport Beach in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Cicero, Illinois thetownofcicero.comweb address from Wikidata (P856), not the .gov registry | 57 | No | 32 | |
| Buena Park, California buenapark.comweb address from Wikidata (P856), not the .gov registry | 46 | Gated | 30 | |
| Doral, Florida doral-fl.govCity of Doral; the registrant name "City of Doral" sits on the police domain, the city site is doral-fl.gov | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Miami Beach, Florida miamibeachfl.govregistered as City of Miami Beach in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Woodbury, Minnesota woodburymn.govregistered as City of Woodbury in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Loveland, Colorado ci.loveland.co.usblockedweb address from Wikidata (P856), not the .gov registry; not measured: HTTP 403 (Akamai) | — | No | — | |
| Lynchburg, Virginia lynchburgva.govregistered as City of Lynchburg, VA - Department of Information Technology in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Pharr, Texas pharr-tx.govregistered as City of Pharr in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Largo, Florida largo.comweb address from Wikidata (P856), not the .gov registry | 43 | Gated | 32 | |
| Rapid City, South Dakota rapidcity.govregistered as City of Rapid City in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Apex, North Carolina apexnc.govregistered as APEX, TOWN OF in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Johns Creek, Georgia johnscreekga.govregistered as City of Johns Creek in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Alhambra, California alhambraca.govregistered as City of Alhambra in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Bethlehem, Pennsylvania bethlehem-pa.govregistered as City of Bethlehem in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Flower Mound, Texas flowermound.govregistered as Town of Flower Mound in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Upland, California uplandca.govregistered as City of Upland in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Flint, Michigan cityofflint.comweb address from Wikidata (P856), not the .gov registry | 61 | No | 31 | |
| Lakeville, Minnesota lakevillemn.govregistered as City of Lakeville in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Broomfield, Colorado broomfield.orgweb address from Wikidata (P856), not the .gov registry | 39 | No | 24 | |
| Cedar Park, Texas cedarparktexas.govregistered as City of Cedar Park in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Plymouth, Minnesota plymouthmn.govregistered as City of Plymouth in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Missoula, Montana missoula.govregistered as City of Missoula in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Mableton, Georgia mableton.govregistered as CITY OF MABLETON in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Bloomington, Illinois bloomingtonil.govregistered as City of Bloomington in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Milpitas, California milpitas.govregistered as City of Milpitas in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Wyoming, Michigan wyomingmi.govregistered as City of Wyoming in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Parma, Ohio cityofparma-oh.govregistered as City of Parma, Ohio in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| St. George, Louisiana stgeorgela.govregistered as City of St. George Louisiana in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Bowling Green, Kentucky bgky.orgweb address from Wikidata (P856), not the .gov registry | 50 | Gated | 31 | |
| Maricopa, Arizona maricopa-az.govregistered as City of Maricopa in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Lakewood, California lakewoodca.govregistered as City of Lakewood, California in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Bismarck, North Dakota bismarcknd.govregistered as City of Bismarck in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Racine, Wisconsin cityofracinewi.govregistered as City of Racine in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Tustin, California tustinca.orgweb address from Wikidata (P856), not the .gov registry | 48 | No | 1 | |
| Ankeny, Iowa ankenyiowa.govregistered as City of Ankeny in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| San Marcos, Texas sanmarcostx.govregistered as CIty of San Marcos in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Marysville, Washington marysvillewa.govregistered as City of Marysville in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Pittsburg, California pittsburgca.govregistered as CITY OF PITTSBURG in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Rochester Hills, Michigan rochesterhills.orgweb address from Wikidata (P856), not the .gov registry | 43 | Gated | 32 | |
| Chino Hills, California chinohills.govregistered as City of Chino Hills in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Missouri City, Texas missouricitytx.govregistered as City of Missouri City in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Flagstaff, Arizona flagstaffaz.govregistered as City of Flagstaff in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Schaumburg, Illinois schaumburgil.govregistered as Village of Schaumburg in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Pawtucket, Rhode Island pawtucketri.govregistered as City of Pawtucket in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Rogers, Arkansas rogersar.govregistered as City of Rogers in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Alameda, California alamedaca.govregistered as City of Alameda in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Rocklin, California ci.rocklin.ca.usweb address from Wikidata (P856), not the .gov registry | 63 | No | 1 | |
| Caldwell, Idaho cityofcaldwell.comweb address from Wikidata (P856), not the .gov registry | 49 | Gated | 1 |
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