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AI answer products can cite web sources, but each system retrieves and ranks information differently. This study did not measure traffic or citation outcomes. It measured whether Calgary small business sites implemented the technical signals in the audit rubric available at the time.

So we measured. This is the result.

What We Did

We pulled 152 Calgary small business sites by scraping 13 public listicles ("best Calgary restaurants 2026", "best Calgary gyms", "best general contractors in Calgary", and so on) across six industries: restaurants, fitness, cafes, general contractors, construction, and electricians. We grabbed every external link, threw out social platforms (Facebook, Instagram, X), aggregator domains (TripAdvisor, OpenTable, Yelp), and infrastructure noise (Google, Cloudflare, jQuery), and deduped to one entry per business.

Then we ran every site through the same free AEO audit we use on clients. It pulls the homepage, llms.txt, robots.txt, and sitemap.xml, and grades 14 signals on a tiered rubric out of 88 points. 123 of the 152 came back clean. The other 29 had DNS failures, 403s, or timeouts we couldn't resolve at the time. Methodology section at the bottom has the exact sources, the audit code, and a reproducible script if you want to run the same thing.

The Headline Number

Of the 123 sites we audited, zero scored Strong (85% or higher on the 88-point rubric). The best one landed in Decent (65 to 84%). The average was 44%.

Methodology note. This article preserves the 14-signal, 88-point rubric used for the original dataset. The live audit now has 13 checks worth 66 points, treats llms.txt as an optional 2-point discovery file, has no universal word minimum, and does not score SpeakableSpecification. FAQPage earns 2 optional points only when its questions and answers match visible content. It is not a Google ranking factor.

Tier Distribution

The 123 sites broke down across the four tiers like this:

Translation: 92% of Calgary small business sites are below Decent, meaning they're missing several core AEO signals. 35% sit in Invisible (under 40% of points), meaning AI engines won't reliably surface them even when the query is a dead match for what they sell.

What Calgary Sites Are Missing (Per-Check Pass Rates)

The audit grades 14 individual signals. Each row below shows the percent of Calgary sites that "passed" each check (passing = scoring at least 60% of the available points for that signal).

The good news

97% did not explicitly block the bot user agents checked by the archived rubric. That list mixed search retrieval agents with training crawlers. The result documents the original measurement and should not be read as proof that 97% of the sites had complete AI-search retrieval access. We picked that mixup apart on its own in the AI-blocking myth piece, which checked 403 Calgary sites individually for retrieval access.

The bad news, ranked

0% had SpeakableSpecification under the archived rubric. The original audit counted it as a 2-point bonus. The current audit removed that check because Google limits speakable eligibility to topical news publishers. The 0% result remains part of the historical dataset, not a current recommendation.

3% had FAQPage schema with matching visible answers. The live audit treats that parity as an optional 2 of 66 points. FAQPage is not a Google ranking factor and does not guarantee extraction or citation.

7% have a named author / E-E-A-T signal. Both Google and the AI engines weight author credentials when judging whether content is trustworthy. The fix is dirt-cheap: a <meta name="author"> tag, or a Person JSON-LD block with a short bio. 93% of Calgary SMBs ship pages with no human attached.

24% had an llms.txt file. llms.txt is a proposed, optional discovery format with incomplete adoption. The live audit assigns it 2 of 66 points. Google says it does not use the file, and its presence does not guarantee discovery or citation.

31% have BreadcrumbList schema. Helps AI engines understand the structure of your site and link to the right level. Most CMS templates can add this automatically. Almost none of the audited Calgary sites have done it.

42% have a meta description in the 120 to 160 character range. Either missing entirely, too short to fill the search snippet, or too long and getting truncated. This is a five-minute fix per page that compounds across every search appearance the site ever gets.

49% ship a page with more than one H1 (or none at all). A clean single H1 is the most basic SEO instruction on the internet, and half of Calgary SMB sites get it wrong. Almost always a CMS template issue.

50% have shallow Organization schema. Even when a Calgary site ships Organization JSON-LD, the average filled-in field count is low. Name and URL show up, then nothing: no logo, no address, no contactPoint, no sameAs. Average score on this check across the sample was 3.7 out of 10. AI engines use these fields to verify the brand and tell it apart from other brands with similar names.

Why This Matters

These numbers are a technical snapshot of the sampled sites under the archived rubric. They do not prove that any individual check causes visibility or citations. AI systems select sources differently, and their retrieval behavior changes over time.

When an AI product answers a local-service question, it may use retrieved web sources, internal model knowledge, or both. Clear entity data, crawlable content, and factual service pages make a site easier to understand, but no technical checklist guarantees selection.

Under the archived rubric, 92% of the successful audits scored below Decent. That finding shows how uncommon the measured technical setup was in the sample. It is not a measure of citation share, and it should not be compared directly with scores from the current 13-check audit. For the citation side of the picture, we ran 50 real ChatGPT queries against Calgary marketing agencies and logged who actually got named.

What to Do With This (If You Run a Calgary Business)

Three concrete moves, in order of leverage.

1. Run your own site through the free AEO audit. See where you land against the Calgary average of 44%. Score above 65 and you're in the top 8%. Score above 85 and you're the only Calgary site we've found at that level.
2. Use the current audit as a technical punch list. Prioritize retrieval access for search and user-requested agents, factual Organization or LocalBusiness schema, accountable authorship where it belongs, crawlable page content, and a clean sitemap. Add llms.txt only as an optional discovery aid. If you are deciding whether to fix it in-house or hire it out, here is what fixing this costs.
3. Treat this as a head start. With zero Calgary sites in Strong, whoever gets there first builds the flywheel. Every AI query in your category that surfaces your site becomes another signal that you're the source to cite, which makes the next citation more likely. The window to be first in your Calgary industry is open right now.

Methodology

Sample. 152 unique Calgary small business website origins, scraped from 13 public Calgary industry listicles published in 2025 and 2026. Industries covered: restaurants (Avenue Calgary's 2026 Best 13, The Best Calgary's New Restaurants), gyms and fitness (The Best Calgary's Gym Memberships, Rank Calgary's 2026 Top Gyms), cafes and coffee (The Best Calgary's Cafes and Coffee), general contractors (The Best Calgary's General Contractors, Construction Companies, Calgary Contractors, Renovation Contractors), electricians (The Best Calgary's Electricians), and renovation specialists (Clever Canadian, Elevate Calgary). Of 152 origins, 123 returned a successful audit. The other 29 failed at the network layer (DNS, timeout, 403). The 19% failure rate is normal for public scraping at scale, and there's no reason to think it skews the sample one way or the other.

Audit tool. Every site was processed through the free Meridian15 AEO audit (the same one available at fifteenthmeridian.com/tools/aeo-audit). It fetches the homepage, llms.txt, robots.txt, and sitemap.xml from the same domain, then runs 14 graded checks on a tiered rubric out of 88 points. The audit source code lives in our public codebase. The bulk-audit script that ran this study is at tools/bulk-audit.js in the same repo, and the URL list at data/calgary-urls.txt.

Tier definitions. Strong = 85% or higher. Decent = 65 to 84%. Behind = 40 to 64%. Invisible = under 40%. These match the live audit's tier output.

Limitations. This is a single-URL audit per site (the homepage), not a full-site crawl. Domain-level signals (llms.txt, sitemap, robots.txt) are checked once per site. Page-level signals are only evaluated on the homepage, so a site with weaker AEO on the homepage and stronger AEO on inner pages would score worse here than it deserves. The sample is also biased toward businesses the listicle authors found worth recommending, so the long tail of Calgary SMBs without strong reputational signals is almost certainly worse, not better, than what we measured.

Replication. If you want to reproduce this on another market, the audit tool is free and the bulk script is open source. Publish your analysis and send us the URL via the contact page. We'll link back from this methodology section.

What's Next

We'll repeat this audit every year to track the trend, and we're expanding it to the other markets we work in (London Canary Wharf, Lisbon) next. If you're a Calgary marketer, journalist, or business owner who wants to dig into the data yourself, we're open-sourcing the per-site results. Ping us via the contact page and we'll send you the JSON.

If you want help improving your current technical foundation, our SEO and AEO retainer covers retrieval access, factual schema, accountable content, technical cleanup, and ongoing measurement. We add llms.txt when it is useful, not as a substitute for those fundamentals.

Related Reading

• We Built a Free AEO audit Tool. Here's What It Checks (and Why). The methodology behind the audit we used in this study.
• llms.txt Explained: What It Does, Who Uses It, and What It Does Not Do. How the optional discovery file fits the current technical stack.
• AEO for Calgary businesses: why local brands need to be cited by AI search.
• Meridian15 Calgary, our home market.
• Best Perplexity Rank Tracking Tools (2026). The companion piece on monitoring AI citations once your setup is in place.

Frequently Asked Questions

How were the 152 Calgary websites selected?

We scraped 13 public Calgary listicles across restaurants, fitness, cafes, contractors, construction, electricians, and renovation. From each listicle we pulled every external link, filtered out social platforms and infrastructure domains (Google, Facebook, Instagram, TripAdvisor, Yelp, etc.), deduped by origin, and validated the resulting list. 152 origins went in, 123 came back with a usable audit. The other 29 had connectivity issues we couldn't resolve at the time.

What does it mean that 0% of audited Calgary sites scored Strong?

The audit grades each site on 14 AI search readiness signals (llms.txt, JSON-LD schema, AI crawler permissions, named author / E-E-A-T, single H1, meta description length, Open Graph, sitemap, content depth, plus bonus signals) on a tiered rubric out of 88 points. Strong = 85% or higher. None of the 123 Calgary small business sites we audited cleared that bar. The best one landed in Decent (65 to 84%). The average was 44%.

What is llms.txt and why does it matter?

llms.txt is a proposed, optional discovery file that can summarize a site and point to important pages. Support is incomplete, Google says it does not use the file, and it does not guarantee discovery or citations. The original study measured adoption under its archived rubric. The live audit now assigns llms.txt 2 of 66 points.

Did any check come back positive across most Calgary sites?

Yes. Under the archived rubric, 97% of audited sites did not explicitly block the bot user agents included in that study. The original list mixed retrieval agents with training crawlers, so the result documents the old measurement and should not be read as proof that 97% had complete AI-search retrieval access.

How does this study compare to AEO data in other markets?

There isn't a good baseline yet. Most existing AEO research focuses on enterprise brands or Fortune 500 companies, where the structural setup is much further along. Small business AEO data is rare. Our hunch is that Calgary numbers track with most North American secondary markets where AEO awareness hasn't hit SMB owners yet. We'll repeat this audit every year to track it.

What should a Calgary business owner do with this data?

Use the study as a historical benchmark, not a current score comparison. Run the current 13-check audit to find technical gaps, then prioritize retrieval access, factual Organization or LocalBusiness schema, accountable authorship where appropriate, crawlable content, and a clean sitemap. llms.txt is optional and worth 2 of 66 points.