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 801–900 of 1,000 · page 9 of 10
| Site | Score | Gated | Pages read | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cleveland, Tennessee clevelandtn.govregistered as City of Cleveland, Tennessee in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Florissant, Missouri florissantmo.comblockedweb address from Wikidata (P856), not the .gov registry; not measured: HTTP 429 (Cloudflare) | — | No | — | |
| Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio ci.cuyahoga-falls.oh.usweb address from Wikidata (P856), not the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Troy, New York troyny.govregistered as City of Troy, NY in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Hoffman Estates, Illinois hoffmanestates.orgweb address from Wikidata (P856), not the .gov registry | 49 | No | 32 | |
| Harrisonburg, Virginia harrisonburgva.govregistered as City of Harrisonburg in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| La Crosse, Wisconsin lacrossewi.govregistered as City of La Crosse in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Paramount, California paramountcity.govregistered as City of Paramount in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Watsonville, California watsonville.govregistered as City of Watsonville in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Grapevine, Texas grapevinetx.govregistered as City of Grapevine in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Draper, Utah draperutah.govregistered as Draper City in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| San Luis Obispo, California slocity.orgblockedCity of San Luis Obispo, verified by fetching the site; not measured: HTTP 403 (Akamai) | — | No | — | |
| Harrisburg, Pennsylvania harrisburgpa.govregistered as City of Harrisburg in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Lawrence, Indiana cityoflawrence.orgweb address from Wikidata (P856), not the .gov registry | 45 | No | 32 | |
| Downers Grove, Illinois downers.usblockedweb address from Wikidata (P856), not the .gov registry; not measured: HTTP 403 (Cloudflare) | — | No | — | |
| Enid, Oklahoma enid.orgweb address from Wikidata (P856), not the .gov registry | 40 | Gated | 32 | |
| Holly Springs, North Carolina hollyspringsnc.govregistered as Town of Holly Springs in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Barnstable Town, Massachusetts barnstable.govregistered as Town of Barnstable in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Waxahachie, Texas waxahachietx.govregistered as City of Waxahachie in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Columbia, Tennessee columbiatn.govregistered as City of Columbia in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Stillwater, Oklahoma stillwaterok.govregistered as City of Stillwater in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Plainfield, Illinois plainfieldil.govregistered as Village of Plainfield in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| St. Louis Park, Minnesota stlouisparkmn.govregistered as City of St. Louis Park in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Greer, South Carolina cityofgreersc.govregistered as City of Greer in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Leesburg, Virginia leesburgva.govregistered as Town of Leesburg, Virginia in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Portage, Michigan portagemi.govregistered as City of Portage in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Aliso Viejo, California alisoviejo.govregistered as City of Aliso Viejo in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Cedar Hill, Texas ci.cedarhill.tx.usweb address from Wikidata (P856), not the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Titusville, Florida titusville.comweb address from Wikidata (P856), not the .gov registry | 43 | Gated | 21 | |
| Glendora, California cityofglendora.govregistered as City of Glendora in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Los Banos, California losbanos.govregistered as City of Los Banos in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Coral Gables, Florida coralgablesfl.govregistered as City Of Coral Gables in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Wilson, North Carolina wilsonnc.orgblockedweb address from Wikidata (P856), not the .gov registry; not measured: HTTP 403 (Akamai) | — | No | — | |
| Wentzville, Missouri wentzvillemo.govregistered as City of Wentzville in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Rosemead, California rosemeadca.govregistered as City of Rosemead in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Covina, California covinaca.govregistered as City of Covina in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Sheboygan, Wisconsin sheboyganwi.govregistered as City of Sheboygan in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Shakopee, Minnesota shakopeemn.govregistered as City of Shakopee in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| East Lansing, Michigan cityofeastlansing.comweb address from Wikidata (P856), not the .gov registry | 36 | Gated | 23 | |
| Chesterfield, Missouri chesterfield.mo.usweb address from Wikidata (P856), not the .gov registry | 40 | Gated | 32 | |
| Gainesville, Georgia gainesvillega.govregistered as City of Gainesville in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Poway, California poway.govregistered as City of Poway in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Dublin, Ohio dublinohiousa.govregistered as City of Dublin, Ohio in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Huntsville, Texas huntsvilletx.govregistered as City of Huntsville in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Lakewood, Ohio lakewoodoh.govregistered as City of Lakewood in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Ceres, California ceres.govregistered as City of Ceres in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Spanish Fork, Utah spanishfork.govregistered as Spanish Fork City in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Hattiesburg, Mississippi hattiesburgms.comweb address from Wikidata (P856), not the .gov registry | 42 | No | 31 | |
| Cypress, California cypressca.govregistered as City of Cypress in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Wauwatosa, Wisconsin wauwatosa.govregistered as City of Wauwatosa in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Urbandale, Iowa urbandale.orgweb address from Wikidata (P856), not the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Fuquay-Varina, North Carolina fuquay-varina.orgweb address from Wikidata (P856), not the .gov registry | 41 | Gated | 24 | |
| Biloxi, Mississippi biloxi.govregistered as City of Biloxi in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Middletown, Connecticut middletownct.govregistered as City of Middletown in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Prescott, Arizona prescott-az.govregistered as City of Prescott in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| East Providence, Rhode Island eastprovidenceri.govregistered as City of East Providence in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Beavercreek, Ohio beavercreekohio.govregistered as City of Beavercreek in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Oro Valley, Arizona orovalleyaz.govregistered as Town of Oro Valley in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Winter Garden, Florida wintergarden.govregistered as City of Winter Garden in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Altamonte Springs, Florida altamonte.orgweb address from Wikidata (P856), not the .gov registry | 41 | Gated | 21 | |
| Euclid, Ohio cityofeuclid.govregistered as City Of Euclid in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Bedford, Texas bedfordtx.govregistered as City of Bedford in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Newark, California newarkca.govregistered as City of Newark in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Glenview, Illinois glenview.il.usunreachableweb address from Wikidata (P856), not the .gov registry | — | No | — | |
| Oakley, California oakleyca.govregistered as City of Oakley in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Olive Branch, Mississippi obms.usweb address from Wikidata (P856), not the .gov registry | 48 | No | 1 | |
| Azusa, California azusaca.govregistered as City of Azusa in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Attleboro, Massachusetts cityofattleboro.usweb address from Wikidata (P856), not the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Riverton, Utah rivertonutah.govregistered as Riverton City in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Mansfield, Ohio mansfieldohio.govregistered as City of Mansfield in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Minot, North Dakota minotnd.govweb address from Wikidata (P856), not the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Brea, California cityofbrea.govregistered as City of Brea in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Niagara Falls, New York niagarafallsny.govregistered as City of Niagara Falls in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Kiryas Joel, New York kiryasjoel.govregistered as Village of Kiryas Joel in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Mentor, Ohio cityofmentor.comweb address from Wikidata (P856), not the .gov registry | 61 | Gated | 32 | |
| Roswell, New Mexico roswell-nm.govregistered as City of Roswell in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Roseville, Michigan roseville-mi.govregistered as City of Roseville in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Monroe, Louisiana monroela.usweb address from Wikidata (P856), not the .gov registry | 65 | No | 32 | |
| Sayreville, New Jersey sayreville.comweb address from Wikidata (P856), not the .gov registry | 38 | Gated | 1 | |
| Post Falls, Idaho postfalls.govregistered as City of Post Falls in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Midlothian, Texas midlothiantx.govregistered as City of Midlothian in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Delaware, Ohio cityofdelawareoh.govregistered as City of Delaware in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Moorhead, Minnesota moorheadmn.govregistered as City of Moorhead in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Mankato, Minnesota mankatomn.govregistered as City of Mankato in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Binghamton, New York binghamton-ny.govregistered as City of Binghamton in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Hackensack, New Jersey hackensack.orgweb address from Wikidata (P856), not the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Cerritos, California cerritos.govregistered as City of Cerritos in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| DeLand, Florida delandfl.govregistered as City of DeLand in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Littleton, Colorado littletonco.govregistered as City of Littleton in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| North Miami Beach, Florida northmiamibeachfl.govregistered as City of North Miami Beach in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| The Colony, Texas thecolonytx.govregistered as City of The Colony in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Charleston, West Virginia charlestonwv.govregistered as City of Charleston in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Elmhurst, Illinois elmhurst.orgweb address from Wikidata (P856), not the .gov registry | 50 | Gated | 32 | |
| Salina, Kansas salina-ks.govregistered as City of Salina in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Keller, Texas cityofkeller.comblockedweb address from Wikidata (P856), not the .gov registry; not measured: HTTP 403 (Akamai) | — | No | — | |
| Farmington, New Mexico farmingtonnm.govregistered as City of Farmington, NM in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Hutto, Texas huttotx.govregistered as City of Hutto in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Schertz, Texas schertztx.govregistered as City of Schertz in the .gov registry | 33 | Gated | 1 | |
| Hickory, North Carolina hickorync.govregistered as City of Hickory in the .gov registry | 28 | Gated | 1 | |
| Haines City, Florida hainescityfl.govregistered as City of Haines City in the .gov registry | 28 | 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