Case Studies · Research

Studies in how machines find, read, and choose businesses.

Raveneye Global conducts primary research into machine readiness: the degree to which search engines and AI systems can find, read, verify, and act upon a business. The program runs on two sides. The supply side measures how ready businesses are to be read by machines; the demand side measures how far buyers now delegate their decisions to them. Each study reports measured figures against their sources, and all are drawn from public data and published in full.

Directed by a technical specialist and reviewed before publication. Author: Chandranshu Kumar.

The research program

A standing body of market research

Supply-side capstone The Machine-Readiness Atlas One method applied across six economies, 205,103 independent businesses in all. The share a machine can fully read ranges roughly 7.6-fold, from 32.1 percent in the United States to 4.2 percent in India. Read the study Demand-side capstone The Delegated Buyer The companion study: how consumers and business buyers are handing discovery and purchase decisions to answer engines and assistants, read through the Delegation Ladder, and why the supply side has not kept pace. Read the study Regional editions The Machine-Readiness Audits The same measurement conducted economy by economy, for the United States, Europe, India, Southeast Asia, Japan, and Africa, each sampled from the trades that populate that market. Read the study Sector study The Retail Visibility Study Which businesses AI answers and local search name when a buyer sets out to purchase, examined across ten independent retail categories. Read the study

The full research index

Selected findings

What the measurements show

205,103: independent small businesses were measured across six economies under a single fixed method, each homepage read for the structured data a machine relies on.
32.1% to 4.2%: is the range in the share of map-listed businesses that are fully machine-readable, from the highest economy measured (the United States) to the lowest (India): a spread of roughly 7.6-fold.
A minority everywhere: describes the fully readable businesses in every economy studied. In most markets they are a small minority, which means the majority are absent from the signals an AI system reads to assemble an answer.
Presence, then markup: are the two gaps in sequence. Web presence is the first divide, about 97 percent of United States businesses have a site against roughly a third in India, but even where a site exists, most carry no local-entity markup a machine can read.

Source: Raveneye Global Machine-Readiness Atlas, six first-party audits, 205,103 independent small businesses sampled from Google Business Profile map listings across six economies, twelve trades each, July 2026.

Method

How the studies are conducted

Each study samples businesses from their Google Business Profile map listings across a fixed set of trades, then reads every homepage for the structured data a machine relies on to represent a business. The design favors replicability over reach: one method, applied identically across markets and repeated on a stated cadence, so that a figure measured in one economy can be set beside another and against the same economy a quarter later.

What "machine-readable" denotes: The studies measure whether a search engine or AI system can locate a business, parse what it is, and rely on structured signals to represent it. In practice this reduces to two observable conditions: whether the business has a crawlable web page at all, and whether that page carries local-entity markup a machine can read without inference.
Why each figure is a floor: Every sample is drawn from businesses that already maintain an active Google Business Profile map listing. Because these are, by construction, among the more digitally established businesses in each market, the reported readiness figures are floors rather than central estimates. The true population share is unlikely to be higher.
Cadence and provenance: The Atlas is the first edition of a benchmark repeated each quarter, and every regional study carries its own method, sample, and date. Every figure is measured rather than modeled, and each is reported against its source so that any reader may reconstruct it.

Read the studies in full.

Read the research Measure your own business

Each study is published with its method, sample, and sources. A Machine-Readiness Score applies the same instruments to a single business.