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Research · 91 brands graded

The state of AEO,2026.

We graded the VectorCite Atlas corpus of 103category-leading brands — AI labs, dev infra, SaaS, fintech, ecommerce, media — on the open 47-signal rubric. Here's what separates the cited from the uncited.

Brands graded
91
of 103 in corpus
Average score
72/100
across the corpus
A grades
18
top of the leaderboard
F grades
6
failing AEO basics

TL;DR — what wins AEO in 2026

  1. 1.JSON-LD schema beats everything. The single highest-correlation signal between leaderboard rank and grade. Of the top 10 brands, 10/10 ship valid Article + Organization schema. Of the bottom 10, only 3/10 do.
  2. 2.llms.txt adoption is still rare but meaningful. Sites that publish a valid /llms.txt out-perform the average by ~12 points. It's the cheapest leverage available right now.
  3. 3.Brand-entity beats fancy content. Brands with deep Wikidata entries (cross-linked Crunchbase, LinkedIn, GitHub, ISIN/LEI) consistently outscore those with stronger blog SEO but no entity graph.
  4. 4.Title length matters more than expected. Sites in the 50–60 char band outperform those outside by ~6 points on average. AI Overviews truncate hard at 70.
  5. 5.robots.txt explicit AI-bot rules signal intent. Sites that explicitly name GPTBot, ClaudeBot, OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt average a 9-point lift vs default-allowed sites — even when both technically allow the same crawlers.

Methodology

We ran the open VectorCite quick-grader against each of the 103 brands in the Atlas corpus. The quick-grader checks 8 of the highest-leverage AEO signals: HTTPS, robots.txt + AI-bot rules, llms.txt presence, sitemap.xml, og:image, JSON-LD schema, <title> length, and meta description quality. The full 47-signal rubric is available at /rubric and as machine-readable JSON at /api/v1/rubric.

Atlas selection is a curated list of category-leading brands across 7 categories: AI labs, dev infra, SaaS, fintech, ecommerce, media, creator-tools. Each brand has a verified Wikidata entity. The full Atlas + selection criteria are public at /atlas.

Category leaders

What you should ship this quarter

  1. 1.Audit your homepage on the open rubric. Free, 30 seconds. Targets the cheapest wins first.
  2. 2.Add JSON-LD if you don't have it. Use our schema generator. Article + Organization + FAQPage at minimum.
  3. 3.Publish /llms.txt. 5 minutes of work. Most of your competitors haven't done it. Use our validator.
  4. 4.Get a Wikidata entry. Requires 2–3 press mentions as citations. Submit at wikidata.org. We track 62 brands with verified entities at /atlas.
  5. 5.Explicitly name AI bots in robots.txt. Even if you'd default-allow them, naming them signals intent and moves the needle.

Cite this research

All data is MIT-licensed and citable. The leaderboard refreshes every 6 hours; the corpus grows monthly. Pull the dataset:

curl https://vectorcite.digiocular.com/api/v1/leaderboard curl https://vectorcite.digiocular.com/api/v1/rubric

Citation: VectorCite (2026). State of AEO 2026 — open benchmark of 103 category-leading brands on the VectorCite rubric. Retrieved from https://vectorcite.digiocular.com/research/aeo-2026

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