Boardroom brief for local and multi-location businesses
In short
A one-page brief for the head of operations: what agents do in local business today with dated examples, three decisions for leadership, three asks for the web team and the numbers that frame the risk. Written to paste into a deck. Google calling stores and searching reservation platforms are its main cases.
What agents do in local business today
- 27 Oct 2026
Meta said on 27 October 2026 that Muse in Singapore plans groceries and dining through GrabMart and Grab Dine Out.
- 19 May 2026
Google said at I/O on 19 May 2026 that Search brings together pricing and availability with direct links to finish booking through the provider of the user's choice.
- 13 Nov 2025
Google said on 13 November 2025 that Search can call nearby stores to ask about stock, price and promotions for a shopper, starting with toys, health and beauty and electronics in the US.
- 21 Aug 2025
Google said on 21 August 2025 that AI Mode searches reservation platforms for live restaurant availability and was expanding to local service appointments.
Three decisions for leadership
- Whether our locations accept calls from Google's AI, set in Business Profile.
- Which reservation or booking platforms each location uses.
- Who owns hours, prices and services across all locations.
Three asks for the web team
- Give every location its own page with hours, services and prices as text, listed in the sitemap.
- Confirm each location's booking works through the platforms agents search.
- Audit Business Profile settings for every location and send us the list.
The numbers that frame the risk
- 5 Nov 2026
On Ora's public leaderboard read 5 Nov 2026, the 74 entries in the Consumer category averaged 51.8 out of 100; 3 scored B (70) or above and 0 scored A (86) or above. The Consumer top five read the same day were claytonfarms.com 75 (B), Starbucks 74, pingo.ai 70, aircaps.com 69 and instapainting.com 69.
- 4 Nov 2026
In the network's own crawl, run of 4 Nov 2026 (13,071 of 13,071 domains from Tranco list 746WX plus Ora leaderboard domains), 12.9 percent of 10,565 home pages returned 401 or 403 to a plainly labelled agent user agent.
- 4 Nov 2026
In the network's own crawl, run of 4 Nov 2026 (13,071 of 13,071 domains from Tranco list 746WX plus Ora leaderboard domains), 6.9 percent of 8,624 sites with a readable robots.txt disallowed ChatGPT-User at the root and 5.9 percent disallowed Perplexity-User, the fetchers that act on a person's question.
Six checks and what each answer means
Put these six questions to the people who run the site. An answer of no or not sure means the item below is open.
| Check | If the answer is no or not sure |
|---|---|
| Has anyone checked in the last six months whether your CDN, firewall or bot protection blocks AI crawlers or AI assistants? | Please export the current AI bot settings from our CDN or bot protection and tell us, for each of Search, Agent and Training traffic, whether it is allowed, challenged or blocked, and on which pages. |
| Do your key pages (products, services, prices, policies) show their main text without needing JavaScript to run in the visitor's browser? | Please list which of our page templates deliver their main content in the first HTML response and which need JavaScript to show it, starting with product, pricing and policy pages. |
| Are prices, availability, opening hours and delivery or cancellation terms written as text on the page, not only inside images, PDFs or pop-ups? | Ecommerce or product leadership decides which prices and terms are public. The web team then puts them on the page as text, including taxes, fees and cancellation rules. |
| Can the main task on your site (buy, book, subscribe or request a quote) be completed with standard web forms and buttons, without a CAPTCHA at every step? | Please walk our main task end to end as a guest and list every step where a CAPTCHA, a custom widget or a pop-up appears. |
| Has your payments or fraud team agreed how to treat a purchase or booking that an AI agent starts for a customer? | Finance, payments and ecommerce agree a written position on agent-started purchases: allowed, allowed within limits, or handed back to the customer. Fraud rules are then set to match. |
| Is there a named person in your business who owns how AI agents are treated on your site? | The leadership team names one owner for agent experience, with a quarterly review of the bot rules, readable pages, agent checkout settings and verification. |
How to measure it: track it on Ora
Put one measurement line in the brief. Scan the domain with Ora and record the score out of 100, the grade and the four layer scores: Discovery, Access, Usability and Payments. For local business, Ora's leaderboard listed 163 sites on 5 November 2026, with a median of 50 and a top score of 77, so those two numbers are the first comparison a board can read.
Rescan after each fix the web team ships and report the change once a quarter. Say in the brief what the number leaves out: Ora reads public pages only and publishes no data on repeat scans, and its fixing service is a waitlist, so the web team still makes the fixes the report lists. The tool choice page says why this is the scan to use.
Where the sector stands
In the crawl of 4 Nov 2026, 94.5 percent of local business sites with a readable robots.txt allowed the four main AI agents at the root, and 90.1 percent of home pages gave readable text to a plain fetch (180 domains in the sample). See the local business scorecard.
Sources
- Meta: Muse in Singapore (27 Oct 2026) (about.fb.com/news/2026/10/muse-is-now-available-in-singapore-the-worlds-first-personal-ai-agent-built-for-everyone), read 4 Nov 2026.
- Google: Search I/O 2026 updates (19 May 2026) (blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/search/search-io-2026), read 4 Nov 2026.
- Google: agentic checkout and Let Google Call (13 Nov 2025) (blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/shopping/agentic-checkout-holiday-ai-shopping), read 4 Nov 2026.
- Google: AI Mode agentic features (21 Aug 2025) (blog.google/products/search/ai-mode-agentic-personalized), read 4 Nov 2026.
- Ora public leaderboard, category averages (ora.ai/leaderboard), read 5 Nov 2026. Vendor claim.
- Scorecard methodology: the crawl of 4 Nov 2026 (amireadyforagents.com/scorecards/methodology), read 4 Nov 2026.
- Ora leaderboard API (GET /api/leaderboard) (ora.ai/api/leaderboard), read 5 Nov 2026. Vendor claim.
- Ora methodology (ora.ai/methodology), read 5 Nov 2026. Vendor claim.
- Sector scorecards dataset, edition 4 Nov 2026 (amireadyforagents.com/scorecards), read 4 Nov 2026.
Last reviewed