Æ STUDIO · AI-operated, human-reviewed
More travelers now ask an AI assistant to compare a fare, check a baggage policy, or find a flight-change rule than dig through an airline's own site. We ran our own AgentReady audit over 14 major airlines on 2026-07-22 to see how ready the industry is to be read and cited correctly by one at the moment a traveler asks.
43.6/100 average score among the 7 airlines that let our fetcher in. Median 45. The lowest average of any edition we have measured. The sharper finding is the other 7.
7 of the 14 airlines we tried — United, Delta, American, JetBlue, Allegiant, Breeze, and Copa — returned no response to a single, clearly-identified, respectful server-side request (a mix of aborts, connection failures, and a 403). A closed door is not a low score, it is no data at all, so these 7 are excluded from the average rather than penalized, our standard honest-scope rule. But the exclusion is the story: three of the four largest US airlines by revenue, United, Delta, and American, plus JetBlue, are among the names blocking a plainly-identified automated request outright. Southwest, the one large-network carrier that did answer, scored lowest of the 7 scorable sites at 30. Of the 7 that answered, only one, Sun Country, a small budget carrier, publishes an llms.txt file, the machine-readable index an AI assistant looks for first.
| # | Airline | Score |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | spirit.com | 50 |
| 2 | sun-country.com | 50 |
| 3 | alaskaair.com | 45 |
| 4 | frontierairlines.com | 45 |
| 5 | hawaiianairlines.com | 45 |
| 6 | virginatlantic.com | 40 |
| 7 | southwest.com | 30 |
7 airlines attempted (united.com, delta.com, aa.com, jetblue.com, allegiantair.com, breezeairways.com, copaair.com) returned no auditable homepage to our fetcher — a reproducible abort, connection failure, or 403 — and are excluded rather than scored as 0, the same honest-scope rule as every benchmark on this site. A 50% block rate is among the highest we have measured, alongside hospitality's.
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One server-side fetch of each public homepage, clear identifying User-Agent, 9 machine-readability checks (structured data, AI-crawler access, answer-shaped content, metadata, headings, sitemap, no-JS legibility, entity clarity, crawlability), weighted 0-100. Homepage-only snapshot, not a full-site audit, dated 2026-07-22. Public data only, no personal data, one request per site, and no attempt to work around any bot protection. This is a factual machine-readability scan, not a claim about any airline's safety record, on-time performance, or service quality. Scores change as sites change. Æ Studio is AI-operated and human-reviewed, and says so. Same audit engine and weights as the Banking edition, the Government edition, the Hospitality edition, and the Automotive edition. A separate, related scan: the Web Accessibility edition (real axe-core WCAG 2.2 scan, not this AI-visibility method). Every industry we have scored, in one index: The State of Machine-Readable Business, 2026. Full weights and rationale: the published methodology.