The AI Visibility Gap: A Technical Readiness Audit of 173 UK Local Service Business Websites

A technical readiness audit of 173 UK local service business websites across plumbers, solicitors, dental practices and accountants in London, Manchester, Birmingham, Edinburgh and Bristol. Successfully fetched websites were assessed against 10 binary signals connected with machine-readable structure, answer-oriented content, crawlability, internal linking and mobile rendering. Error rows were retained in the dataset and reported separately.<br>Of the 173 audited sites, 165 fetched successfully and 8 returned audit errors. Counting all audited rows, 120 sites (69.4%) were classified as Ready, 41 (23.7%) as Partially Ready, 4 (2.3%) as Not Ready and 8 (4.6%) were unclassified because the page could not be fetched. Among successful fetches, 72.7% were Ready. The strongest signals were crawlability, mobile rendering and entity consistency; the weakest were llms.txt, FAQ content and process explanation. The findings suggest many UK local service websites meet basic technical criteria but often lack explicit answer-ready content.<br>Every numeric claim is re-derivable from the accompanying dataset (supplementary-results.json / .csv) via the included audit script (supplementary-audit-script.py); no figure was entered by hand.<br>Files in this record:• AI-Visibility-Gap-Report-FINAL.pdf / .docx — the full report.• supplementary-results.csv / .json — the 173 scored audit records (all 10 signal scores, totals, readiness tiers).• supplementary-urls.csv / .json — the 173 audited URLs with sector, city and audit status.• supplementary-audit-script.py — the Python script used to score each site (for reproducibility).<br>