AI crawler access across 14 types of local business: restaurants and hotels trail, vets lead
Short answer: the gap between business types is real but not huge. Vets and pet services (90.8%) and cafes and bakeries (90.4%) were the most open to AI crawlers. Hotels and lodging (79.7%) and real estate (80.9%) were the least. Every category had at least 162 sites.
The full table
| Type of business | Sites | Open | Bot check | Homepage didn't load | robots.txt blocks AI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vets and pet services | 207 | 90.8% | 1.9% | 2.9% | 2.9% |
| Cafes and bakeries | 353 | 90.4% | 3.7% | 3.7% | 2.3% |
| Doctors and clinics | 318 | 88.4% | 4.7% | 5.0% | 1.6% |
| Fitness | 248 | 88.3% | 5.2% | 3.6% | 2.8% |
| Hair, beauty and tattoo | 294 | 86.7% | 3.4% | 5.1% | 4.1% |
| Retail shops | 350 | 86.6% | 4.9% | 5.1% | 3.4% |
| Accounting, insurance and finance | 211 | 86.3% | 6.6% | 3.3% | 3.3% |
| Auto repair | 232 | 84.9% | 3.0% | 3.9% | 7.3% |
| Home services and trades | 244 | 84.4% | 7.8% | 4.9% | 2.9% |
| Dentists | 287 | 83.6% | 8.4% | 3.8% | 4.2% |
| Lawyers | 243 | 83.5% | 9.1% | 5.3% | 1.2% |
| Restaurants and bars | 342 | 81.3% | 9.6% | 5.6% | 2.6% |
| Real estate | 162 | 80.9% | 4.3% | 9.9% | 4.3% |
| Hotels and lodging | 202 | 79.7% | 8.9% | 9.4% | 1.5% |
Rows don't add to 100%: a few sites had an unreadable robots.txt.
Three things that stood out
- Restaurants and bars had the most bot checks (33 of 342, 9.6%). That matters because "where should we eat tonight" is exactly the kind of question people now ask AI.
- Auto repair had the most robots.txt blocks (17 of 232, 7.3%), more than twice the overall rate.
- Hotels and real estate lost the most homepages to errors, about 1 in 10 each.
What to do with this
Use your category as a hint about where to look first. If you run a restaurant, start with bot checks; if you run a hotel or a real estate office, start with your HTTPS. Then run the free AI crawler check on your own site. We also have guides for restaurants, dentists, lawyers and home services.
Being readable is the first step. To see whether AI actually names your business, who it names instead and where it contradicts your website, get the full $99 AI visibility audit, paid once.
Data: Preferly, "How many small business websites block AI crawlers?" (2026), https://www.preferly.ai/research/ai-crawler-study. We checked 4,111 small and local business websites in 26 US cities on Oct 22, 2026 and analyzed the 3,693 that responded. The aggregate data is free to reuse under CC BY 4.0 with that credit.
Questions
Why are hotel and real estate sites less open?
In our sample, mostly because more of their homepages didn't load (about 1 in 10), plus bot checks on hotel sites.
Is the difference big enough to matter?
For any one business, what matters is whether your own site is open. The category numbers show where problems are more common.
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