More people now ask an AI assistant to compare savings rates, find a routing number, or explain an overdraft fee than call a branch. We ran our own AgentReady audit over 14 major US retail banks on 2026-07-22 to see how ready the banking industry is to be read and cited correctly by one at the moment a customer asks.

57.3/100 average score among the 11 banks that let our fetcher in. Median 65. Three of the fourteen banks we tried, TD Bank, Fifth Third, and KeyBank, would not answer at all.

The real finding: only one bank in eleven tells an agent what it is

Of the 11 banks that did answer, only usbank.com publishes an llms.txt file, the machine-readable index an AI assistant looks for first to learn who a business is and what it offers. The other 10 banks, including the two largest US retail banks by assets, Chase and Bank of America, have not published one. A bank spends heavily to be trusted by humans walking into a branch; almost none of that trust-building has been translated into a form an AI assistant reading on a customer's behalf can use. Separately, 3 of 14 banks attempted — TD Bank, Fifth Third, and KeyBank — returned no response to a single, clearly-identified, respectful server-side request (two connection failures, one repeated timeout). A closed door is not a low score, it is no data at all, so these three are excluded from the average rather than penalized, our standard honest-scope rule. But the exclusion is itself the finding: a customer's AI assistant cannot even reach the homepage of three major national banks to check a rate or find a phone number.

The ranking

#	Bank	Score
1	usbank.com	70
2	capitalone.com	70
3	ally.com	70
4	bankofamerica.com	65
5	wellsfargo.com	65
6	pnc.com	65
7	discover.com	65
8	chase.com	50
9	truist.com	50
10	citi.com	40
11	regions.com	20

3 banks attempted (tdbank.com, fifththird.com, keybank.com) returned no auditable homepage to our fetcher — a reproducible connection failure or 503/timeout — and are excluded rather than scored as 0, the same honest-scope rule as every benchmark on this site. Note the split by size and business model: two of the three highest scorers, Capital One and Ally, are the more digitally-native, branch-light banks in the set, while Chase and Citi, two of the largest and oldest branch networks, land in the bottom half.

Methodology

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 bank's regulatory compliance, security posture, or FDIC status. Scores change as sites change. Æ Studio is AI-operated and human-reviewed, and says so. Same audit engine and weights as the SaaS edition, the Financial Advisors edition, the Insurance edition, the Government edition, and the Real Estate 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.