We audit independent agency websites for AI search visibility, and the audit records what each site runs on. After 151 audits, 97 of them carrying platform data, here is what the vendors actually look like from the machine’s side. The sample is small and every number below is directional. The full tables, with every denominator, are on the data page.
Last updated: October 9, 2026
What do independent agencies actually run their websites on?
Not what the vendor advertising would suggest. Of the 97 sites with platform data:
| Platform | Share | Median audit score (n) |
|---|---|---|
| Custom or unidentifiable build | 34% | 46 (26) |
| WordPress | 20% | 47 (17) |
| Forge3 AgencyEdge | 11% | 59 (10) |
| Duda | 8% | 56 (8) |
| Wix | 4% | 45 (4) |
| Advisor Evolved | 4% | 57 (4) |
| BrightFire | 3% | 61 (3) |
| EZLynx Website | 3% | 40 (3) |
| Agency Revolution | 3% | 67 (3) |
| ITC / Zywave | 2% | 36 (2) |
| GoDaddy | 2% | 52 (2) |
The two biggest buckets are the two nobody sells at conferences: a custom build from a web shop or a freelancer, and WordPress with whatever theme came with it. The insurance-specialist vendors combined hold about a quarter of the market we see. InsuranceSplash and Weebly did not appear at all.
Read the median scores with the sample sizes next to them. Three BrightFire sites scoring a median of 61 tells you something about those three sites. It does not tell you much about BrightFire.
Which platforms can AI actually read?
This is where the tiers separate cleanly, and it is the finding worth remembering.
Every site our crawler could not read was a custom or unidentifiable build. Seven of the 30 custom sites, 23 percent, needed JavaScript to show any content; to a crawler that does not run scripts, the page was empty. Two more unknown builds were unreadable for other reasons. WordPress had three sites that needed rendering out of 19, but all 19 stayed readable, because WordPress themes generally ship real HTML underneath.
The specialist vendors were clean. Forge3, Duda, Advisor Evolved, BrightFire, EZLynx and ITC: zero unreadable sites among the 26. One Agency Revolution site needed rendering but was still readable. Whatever else you think of the templates, they put the agency’s name, address and services in plain HTML where a machine can find them. That is the first check AI runs and the specialist platforms pass it by default.
The sites that failed it scored a median of 31 against 50 for the readable ones. If you paid a developer for a site in the last few years and you have never checked, check. The audit does it for free.
Where do the specialist vendors fall short?
Sameness. The template that makes them readable also makes them interchangeable.
When the same carrier-logo strip, the same “we shop the market for you” paragraph and the same four service pages appear on two hundred agency sites, the machine has no reason to name yours over the next one. The specialist platforms scored better than custom builds on average, but they clustered in the fifties, and the things that separate a 55 from an 85 were consistent across all of them: no license numbers on the page (94 percent of all audited sites), no InsuranceAgency schema type (65 percent), one generic page instead of one page per line, and no content about the actual county the agency writes in.
Those are not platform limitations, exactly. They are the things a platform cannot do for you because they require knowing the agency. A vendor that serves a thousand agencies cannot write about hail season in Cleveland County for the one in Norman. The agency has to, or somebody has to on its behalf, and in our experience that is the job that never gets done through a ticket queue.
For what each of these vendors charges and what they say about contracts, we put every published price and setup fee side by side in insurance agency website builders compared.
What does this mean if you are choosing a vendor?
Three things.
If you are on a custom build, find out today whether a crawler can read it. That is the single most consequential fact about your site and most owners have never checked.
If you are on a specialist platform, you have the floor covered. The ceiling is the local, specific, named-human content the platform will never write, and the schema details it probably has not filled in. Ask your vendor, by name, whether they emit InsuranceAgency schema and Person schema with license credentials. Those are yes-or-no questions.
If you are choosing, the honest comparison is not vendor against vendor. It is: who is going to do the maintenance? A platform hands you a login. A developer hands you an invoice. We hand you a finished site with the whole checklist done and nothing to log into, for $150 a month ($250 with monthly content), and we build it before you pay so you can judge the difference yourself. The live sites are public, with their scores.