Chicago, 2026-10-15
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 2026-10-15. In Chicago it scanned every restaurants and fast food business with a website of its own: 1,729 sites, 1,150 of them reachable.
Of the reachable sites, 45% turn at least one AI crawler away at the edge, almost always a hosting firewall the owner never chose. 66% 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. 603 sites score A or B. That places Chicago 7 of 57 restaurants and fast food indexes in the edition, ranked by the share of sites that take bookings or orders directly.
Toast is the booking or ordering vendor behind most direct channels in Chicago, on 201 sites.
The assistants have not been asked about Chicago yet; the next edition will say where ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini send people.
[Quote from Antonio Curado, founder of The Direct Index, Brussels. Two sentences on what the number means for owners in Chicago.]
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 Chicago index: https://directindex.org/city/chicago. The edition: https://directindex.org/editions/2026-q4. The method: https://directindex.org/methodology. The data: https://directindex.org/data. Contact: hello@directindex.org.
