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Plumbers beat lawyers in AI visibility — here’s the industry ranking
2026-07-21 · Martin Nymann · 5 min reading
Tradespeople are in a better technical position than solicitors when it comes to AI analysing their websites. 465 sites were assessed based on six technical indicators — see the rankings.
Plumbing firms technically have better websites than solicitors’ when it comes to AI analysing them. Out of 465 Danish business websites scanned on 21 July 2026, plumbing firms scored a median of 85, accountants 75 and solicitors 70 on a scale of 0–100. This is completely at odds with what most people would expect.
The ranking
| Rank | Sector | Median | Average | Scanned |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Plumbing | 85 | 78 | 200 |
| 2 | Accountants & bookkeepers | 75 | 74 | 147 |
| 3 | Solicitors | 70 | 70 | 118 |
How is the score calculated?
The score is deterministic — it is based on six technical signals, not on an estimate or an AI assessment. The weightings are: readable text without JavaScript (40 points), llms.txt (15), robots.txt access for AI crawlers (15), structured data (15), meta description (10) and H1 heading (5). The same site produces the same score every time.
Why do the tradespeople come out on top?
The most likely explanation in our data is simplicity. Plumbing sites are more often built using standard CMS templates with server-rendered HTML — less JavaScript, more text embedded directly in the code. Law firms’ websites are more often design-heavy, and 16 per cent of them have fewer than 150 words of readable text without JavaScript, compared with 5 per cent for plumbing firms.
In other words: it is not the sector’s level of expertise or budget that determines AI visibility. It is whether the content is embedded in the HTML or loaded subsequently.
What can you use the ranking for?
As a benchmark, not as a verdict. If you’re in an industry with a median score of 70, a score of 75 doesn’t mean you’re doing brilliantly — just that you’re slightly better than your nearest competitors. All three sectors share the same major shortcoming: 89 per cent are missing llms.txt, and 38 per cent are missing structured data.
This article is based on the same dataset as our main analysis of 465 Danish corporate websites, where you’ll find the full methodology and all the figures.
Methodology
Data was collected by Geoa on 21 July 2026. We fetched the homepage of 465 Danish company websites without running JavaScript — exactly as GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot do — and measured six technical signals: readable text, llms.txt, robots.txt access for AI crawlers, structured data (schema.org), H1 heading and meta description. The breakdown is 200 plumbing firms, 147 accountants/bookkeepers and 118 solicitors.
Important caveat: the sample consists of search-visible businesses — those that rank in local searches — not a random cross-section of the industry. The figures therefore describe the industry’s most visible businesses. A representative sample would, in all likelihood, look worse, not better. We therefore consistently write ‘of those scanned’, not ‘of all Danish’.
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