Are Turkey's biggest websites ready for AI? We measured 30

Can AI search tools get into your site and read your pages? We measured this on large Turkish sites.

Short answer

• 30 sites, 8 sectors, homepage and robots.txt, 19 October 2026.
• 6 sites (20%) block at least one AI bot in robots.txt. None blocks Googlebot or Bingbot.
• llms.txt (a file that tells AI how to read the site): 10 of the 29 sites we could read have it (34%).
• Average score 68.1 out of 100 (median 73). 5 sites are good (80+), 17 need work, 8 are weak.
• It is a pilot, not a general rule; limits are below.

Bot blocking

Which bot to allow is covered in Robots.txt for AI bots.

• 4 sites block at least one AI search bot; one blocks all three.
• Three of the 4 news sites we measured block AI bots; the others are in e-commerce, software and tourism.
• Two sites block only CCBot (an open web-archive crawler).
• Blocking is often a deliberate choice: publishers may not want their content used for AI training. We do not count it as an error; we only show how much is closed.

llms.txt

10 of the 29 readable sites (34%) have llms.txt. We did not measure whether it changes AI answers; we only checked whether the file exists. We explain the file in What is llms.txt.

Top 5 problems

Signals Ruescan counts as "problem" or "likely problem" for AI readiness, homepage only:

1. No update date on the homepage, or older than 12 months: 25 of 30 sites
2. No sentence introducing the brand at the top of the homepage: 21 of 29
3. No single main heading (H1) on the homepage: 14 of 30
4. No Organization schema: 13 of 30
5. No structured data (JSON-LD) at all: 12 of 30

For the first error, see How to show a last-updated date on your homepage. "Missing" means not found in the page's first HTML; schema or headings added later by JavaScript may not be seen. How to write the missing Organization block: Organization schema for a Turkish company.

Average score by sector

3 or 4 sites per sector: a small sample, so read these as direction only. Score out of 100.

Method

• Date: 19 October 2026.
• Selection: 30 well-known sites with a public homepage across 8 sectors, chosen by hand and written down before scanning. We could not access a ranking source. Site names are not published; results are by sector.
• Not measurable: 11 of the original 30 could not be measured (7 refused automated requests, 3 had low coverage so the score stayed provisional, 1 was unreachable). Each was replaced by the next large site in the same sector; if a replacement could not be measured either, we moved to the next one. 27 replacements were tried and 11 measured, so 19 sites come from the original list and 11 from replacements. For two sectors (e-commerce and tourism) all 4 pre-written candidates failed, so the list was extended with the next large sites; the extension was made after seeing those failures, and the new candidates were not chosen by results. No site was dropped based on results. Still, this can shift the results toward sites that let bots in: sites that shut the door on bots may be underrepresented.
• What we measured: the Ruescan Web engine (rubric 2.4; how the score is calculated), run locally with an honest bot identity. One scan per site, at least 45 seconds between scans. Homepage, robots.txt and llms.txt. Free signals only; no paid API.
• What we did not measure: search rankings and mentions in AI answers. A bot not named in robots.txt counts as "not specified" (allowed); real bot access (e.g. IP-checking firewalls) was not measured.

Limits

• 30 sites is a pilot; the sample is not random and does not support general rules.
• Scans came from a single cloud address; some blocks may be address-specific. In the first list one site scored very differently across runs (one site's two runs differed widely), so we do not read meaning into differences of a few points.
• Homepage only: "missing" means "not found on the homepage", not "missing from the site".
• 3-4 sites per sector: averages are tendencies.
• Sectors were assigned by hand. "Local services" mixes city platforms, a grocery chain and municipalities.