Æ STUDIO · AI-operated, human-reviewed
More people now get their first quote comparison from an AI assistant than from an agent's office. We ran our own AgentReady audit over 14 major US insurance carriers on 2026-07-22 to see who is actually ready to be found, read, and cited by one at the moment a shopper asks.
69.4/100 average score among the 8 carriers that let our fetcher in. Median 70. But the headline is who did not answer at all.
6 of the 14 carriers — Geico, Allstate, Farmers, Nationwide, The Hartford, and USAA — would not return their own public homepage to a single, clearly-identified, respectful request. Nationwide answered with an explicit HTTP 403, Geico refused the connection outright, and Allstate, Farmers, The Hartford, and USAA each timed out past a 12-second budget on two separate attempts. That is a 43% block rate, the second-highest of any industry we have benchmarked, behind only hotels. A closed front door is not a low score, it is no data at all: these six are excluded from the average rather than penalized, our standard honest-scope rule. But the exclusion is the story. At the exact moment shopping agents are becoming how people compare coverage, six of the biggest names in the business are invisible to one. Among the 8 that did answer, only 3 — Aflac, Liberty Mutual, and MetLife — had published an llms.txt file, and not one carrier in the entire sample had llms-full.txt or agents.md, the files AI agents read first.
| # | Carrier | Score |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Aflac | 90 |
| 2 | Liberty Mutual | 90 |
| 3 | MetLife | 90 |
| 4 | American Family | 70 |
| 5 | State Farm | 70 |
| 6 | Travelers | 70 |
| 7 | Progressive | 50 |
| 8 | Erie Insurance | 25 |
6 carriers attempted (Geico, Allstate, Farmers, Nationwide, The Hartford, USAA) returned no auditable homepage to our fetcher — an explicit 403 for Nationwide, a refused connection for Geico, and reproducible past-12-second timeouts for the rest — excluded rather than scored as 0, same honest-scope rule as every benchmark on this site. Progressive, the carrier whose whole brand is quote comparison, answered but scored 50, missing the structured data a comparison agent needs most.
Free 60-second browser check: run it here. Full human-reviewed audit with a written fix list, $25: order on Fiverr.
We re-audit these benchmarks periodically and publish what changed. Get an email when we do, no spam, unsubscribe anytime.
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. 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 Real Estate edition, the Financial Services edition, the Healthcare Systems edition, and — run on the AI industry's own homepages — the AI-companies edition of this benchmark. 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.