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2026 Research Report

UK AI Employer Visibility Index 2026

We audited 580+ UK employers. Here’s what AI gets wrong about them.

580+

Employers audited

40/100

Average score

£18K

Average salary error

58%

Hallucination rate

Key findings

1

78% of AI salary estimates were inaccurate — most underestimated by £15–25K, costing employers qualified candidates who assumed the pay was uncompetitive.

2

91% of UK employers have no llms.txt file, leaving AI models to assemble employer narratives from Reddit threads and Wikipedia stubs.

3

67% of companies lack structured data (JSON-LD) on their homepage, forcing AI to guess basic organisational facts.

4

43% of employers actively block AI crawlers via robots.txt, making themselves invisible to the platforms candidates use most.

5

Only 4% of UK employers score above 80/100 for AI visibility — the gap between leaders and laggards is enormous.

6

Companies with published salary data see AI salary deviations of just £3,200 vs £18,400 for those without.

Industry breakdown

Average AI Visibility Score by sector (out of 100)

Technology
58
Financial Services
47
Healthcare/Pharma
41
Retail
38
Public Sector
31
Hospitality
29

Data from OpenRole audits of 580+ UK employers, February 2026.

Methodology

Each company was audited across four AI models — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini — using standardised employer-related prompts covering salary, culture, benefits, and interview process.

Responses were scored on accuracy, completeness, sentiment, and consistency. Technical signals (structured data, llms.txt, robots.txt, careers page accessibility) were verified programmatically. The methodology is fully documented on our scoring methodology page.

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