DEEP OCEAN RESEARCH №003

Can AI engines read Switzerland's law firms and fiduciaries?

Clients have started asking ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity to recommend a lawyer, a notary, or a fiduciary before they ever open a search page. So we scanned 30 Swiss studi legali, notai, and fiduciarie to answer one question underneath that shift: can the machines even read them? Most cannot.

30 Swiss law firms & fiduciaries scanned 7 crawlers tested 5 Jul 2026 · Switzerland Studi legali · notai · fiduciarie
KEY FINDINGS
83%
25 of 30

publish no llms.txt, no machine-readable brief for the crawlers that feed AI answers.

57%
17 of 30

expose no business entity an AI engine can parse to know who the firm is.

60%
18 of 30

have at least one critical gap: AI cannot reach them, or there is nothing structured to read.

37%
11 of 30

actively turn away at least one AI crawler at the server, while serving Google normally.

THE READABILITY GAP

Five ways to be invisible

AI visibility starts with readability. Before an engine can recommend a business, it has to reach the site and parse who the business is. Across 30 sites, here is how often each layer was missing.

Share of Swiss law firms & fiduciaries with each gap

Percentage of 30 Swiss law firms & fiduciaries scanned, 5 Jul 2026.
No llms.txt brief83% · 25/30
No machine-readable business entity57% · 17/30
At least one critical gap60% · 18/30
Zero structured data at all40% · 12/30
Blocks at least one AI crawler37% · 11/30
CRAWLER ACCESS

Claude gets turned away most

Each site was requested with 7 crawler user-agents. These are the AI engines specifically, showing how often the server returned anything other than a normal 200 response from our test vantage.

Share of Swiss law firms & fiduciaries that blocked each AI crawler

Non-200 response to the engine's user-agent · 30 Swiss law firms & fiduciaries.
Claude · ClaudeBot30% · 9/30
ChatGPT · GPTBot20% · 6/30
Google AI · Google-Extended17% · 5/30
Perplexity · PerplexityBot13% · 4/30
ChatGPT Search · OAI-SearchBot10% · 3/30
2 of 30 sites (7%) returned nothing to any crawler at all, including Google's, which points to wholesale bot protection rather than an AI-specific choice. The rest of the gap comes from sites that turn away one AI crawler specifically while answering the others.

Methodology

SAMPLE
30 independent Swiss studi legali, notai, and fiduciarie, weighted toward Italian-speaking Ticino (Lugano, Bellinzona, Locarno, Mendrisio) with Zurich, Geneva, and Zug included for a national picture. Big Four and international megafirms excluded in favor of independent boutique practices. Firm names are withheld; only aggregate figures are reported.
WHAT WE TESTED
Per-engine crawler access (7 user-agents), presence of llms.txt, robots.txt and sitemap.xml, and homepage structured data (JSON-LD types, including whether a business entity is declared).
CRAWLERS
GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, plus Googlebot and Bingbot as reference.
HOW
Every measurement is a single HTTPS request. Each one is reproducible in ten seconds with curl. The same evidence a business's own web team can check.
DATE
5 Jul 2026, single run.

What this report does not claim

  • This measures readability (whether AI engines can access and parse a site) not citation frequency. How often each business is actually named in AI answers would require a separate, prompt-based study.
  • Access was tested from a single vantage on one date. A few non-responses may reflect transient timeouts or geographic bot rules rather than a permanent block; findings are framed as "from our test vantage" for that reason.
  • Structured-data checks read the homepage only. An entity declared on a deeper page would not be counted here.

Want to know how your firm compares?

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