The Direct Index
Monthly snapshot · Chicago, US

Chicago in October 2026: how usable are its businesses for AI agents?

1,729 restaurant and fast food websites scanned, 1,150 reachable. 45% of the reachable ones turn an AI crawler away at the edge, 66% take a booking or an order on their own domain, 603 score A or B. The month is still running; the page updates hourly.

1,729

sites scanned

45%

turn an AI crawler away

66%

book or order on their own domain

603

score A or B

For October 2026 so far, 1729 restaurants and fast food websites were scanned, with 1150 reachable and 579 unreachable from our scanner. Across the scanned sites, grades were A for 235, B for 368, C for 245, D for 152, and F for 729, with A or B together at 603, which is 35% of the scanned sites. Direct booking or ordering on the business's own domain applies to 756 sites, which is 66% of the reachable sites, while 474 take booking or ordering on the business's own site, 282 do so through a vendor on the business's own site, 40 only through a marketplace, 96 through an unrecognised third party, and 258 have no booking or ordering path. Looking at content and access, 751 sites provide a menu or price list as an HTML page, 63 as a PDF, 36 on another site, 5 as an image, and 295 have no menu or price list, while 518 reachable sites turn at least one AI crawler away at the edge, which is 45% of the reachable sites, and 25 block an AI crawler in robots.txt.

Written by Gemini from the numbers on this page only, 2026-10-15; every number in it is checked against the page before it is shown.

The live index · what changed · JSON · Markdown

Findings

The state of the sites at the end of October 2026

Grades
F729
B368
C245
A235
D152
Menu or price list
HTML page751
none295
PDF63
elsewhere36
image5
Direct booking or ordering
own site474
vendor on own site282
none258
third party96
marketplace40
AI crawlers
Turn at least one away at the edge518
Block one in robots.txt25
Unreachable from our scanner579

Each site counted once, by its latest full scan before the month ended. Menu and channel counts are over the 1,150 reachable sites.

Method

How this page is made

Every business of the index's kind with a website of its own is scanned the same way, about once a month, and every scan is kept. This page takes the latest scan of each site before October 2026 ended, so a site fixed in the following month shows up in the following month's page, not here. A past month does not change. The assistant tables use the latest answer per business and question before the month ended. Methodology · the live index · all cities.