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 dentists, clinics and vets business with a website of its own: 180 sites, 135 of them reachable.
Of the reachable sites, 28% turn at least one AI crawler away at the edge, almost always a hosting firewall the owner never chose. 68% 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. 48 sites score A or B. That places Chicago 11 of 50 dentists, clinics and vets indexes in the edition, ranked by the share of sites that take bookings or orders directly.
NexHealth is the booking or ordering vendor behind most direct channels in Chicago, on 3 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-clinics. The edition: https://directindex.org/editions/2026-q4. The method: https://directindex.org/methodology. The data: https://directindex.org/data. Contact: hello@directindex.org.
