theStacc is running a one-time research study on how visible US local business websites are to AI search tools (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google). Results will be published in aggregate at thestacc.com/research/. No individual business will be named. To check how AI crawlers see your own site, see AI search visibility in theStacc.

What the crawler does

  • Visits each website's homepage, robots.txt and llms.txt only. It never fills in forms, logs in or visits other pages.
  • Makes about a dozen requests per site, a few seconds apart, once (plus one recheck).
  • Some requests use the user-agent names of AI crawlers, so we can see how a site responds to them. It never sends a request as a bot that the site's robots.txt disallows.
  • Identifies itself as theStaccResearch/1.0 and includes a From: header with our contact address.

How to opt out

Add this to your robots.txt, or email us and we'll remove your site and its data:

User-agent: theStaccResearch
Disallow: /

Contact: team@thestacc.com