Brussels, 2026-10-14
The Direct Index, an independent measurement of whether AI assistants can find, read and act on a business's own website, published its Q4 2026 edition today, as a preview with data to 2026-10-14. In Brussels it scanned every restaurants and fast food business with a website of its own: 1,079 sites, 811 of them reachable.
Of the reachable sites, 17% turn at least one AI crawler away at the edge, almost always a hosting firewall the owner never chose. 48% take a booking or an order on their own domain; the rest hand that to a marketplace or offer nothing an agent can act on. 327 sites score A or B. That places Brussels 25 of 57 restaurants and fast food indexes in the edition, ranked by the share of sites that take bookings or orders directly.
Just Eat is the booking or ordering vendor behind most direct channels in Brussels, on 49 sites.
Asked where to book or order at the best-scoring businesses of Brussels, ChatGPT sent people to the business's own site, or a vendor acting for it, in 100% of its answers; Claude in 33%.
[Quote from Antonio Curado, founder of The Direct Index, Brussels. Two sentences on what the number means for owners in Brussels.]
The Direct Index is built by Antonio Curado, an engineer based in Brussels. The method is public, the data is open (ODbL) and nothing in the ranking is for sale. Every business in the index has a page with its findings, a free rescan and a badge. The Brussels index: https://directindex.org/city/brussels. The edition: https://directindex.org/editions/2026-q4. The method: https://directindex.org/methodology. The data: https://directindex.org/data. Contact: hello@directindex.org.
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