Sector Index, September 2026
RICS standardised your survey levels. AI still cannot tell them apart.
We scanned 75 chartered surveyor websites across Surrey the way an AI assistant reads them. Two thirds have no machine readable description of what they do. No firm is named.
The headline
The best of the five sectors, which is not saying much
Surveyors came out ahead of the accountants, solicitors, architects and structural engineers we scanned in the same week. That is worth knowing and it is worth keeping in proportion: the gap is five points, and more than half the profession still sits below the line where an assistant stops answering from your website and starts answering from somewhere else.
The standards problem
A Level 2 survey is a defined thing. Your website does not say so.
Since March 2021 the RICS Home Survey Standard has set out what a Level 1, Level 2 or Level 3 survey involves. It exists so that a homeowner comparing two firms is comparing the same thing. Most Surrey firms describe their levels properly, in clear prose, on a services page.
An assistant asked to compare survey quotes reads that page and finds a wall of text with nothing marking out what is a service, what is a price, or which level is being described. It has to infer all of it.
The profession went to the trouble of standardising its products. The websites describing those products have not been marked up so that a machine can tell one from another.
The hard part, agreeing what the levels mean, is already done. What is missing is the label a machine can read.
The spread
Where the 70 firms landed
Two firms cleared 80, which is two more than most sectors managed. Thirty more sit in the 60s and 70s, close enough that a handful of changes would move them. That is an unusually workable shape.
Where they differ
The checks that separate one firm from another
These are the tests some firms pass and others fail. They are what actually moves a score, because everything further down this page is failed by almost everybody.
| Failing check | Firms | Worth |
|---|---|---|
| Author attribution | 60 of 70 | 10 points |
| Frame protection | 57 of 70 | 5 points |
| Content map for AI | 50 of 70 | 20 points |
| Primary page schema | 47 of 70 | 20 points |
| Strict transport security | 42 of 70 | 20 points |
| Content type protection | 41 of 70 | 5 points |
| Content freshness signals | 36 of 70 | 5 points |
| Entity linking | 36 of 70 | 10 points |
Sixty of the seventy firms publish survey guidance with no machine readable author. For a profession where the author is a chartered surveyor with letters after their name, that is a credibility signal being given away for nothing.
What to fix first
Three changes that would move most firms
Add a typed description saying this is a chartered surveying practice, in this town, offering a Home Survey at this level, in this price range. Forty seven of the seventy firms have nothing of the kind. Worth 20 points and the biggest single win here.
A short index of your key pages with one line each, written for machines rather than visitors. Fifty firms do not have one. It takes an hour and it stops an assistant guessing which of your pages matters.
Sixty firms publish guidance with no machine readable author. Naming the chartered surveyor who wrote it, in a form an assistant can read, costs nothing and is exactly the signal these systems look for.
None of these requires a new website. All three are changes to the one you have.
What comes next
Not one firm is ready for AI to act
Everything above is about reading. The next question is whether an assistant acting for a client can do anything on your website. Request a quote. Book a survey. Ask when you are next free in their postcode.
- A machine readable version of each page
- Any action an assistant could take on a client’s behalf
- A published description of what those actions are
- Discovery tags saying any of it exists
Surveying is one of the better cases for this. A homeowner asking an assistant to get three quotes for a Level 2 survey on a specific address is a realistic thing to want, and the firm that can answer it will be quoting while the others are waiting for a form to be filled in by hand.
Method
How this was done
The list was built from public sources including ricsfirms.com, which publishes regulated firms and their websites, together with local searches across Surrey. National chains and firms acquired into larger groups were excluded, because the marketing decisions for those sit elsewhere.
Each website was checked from the outside, exactly as an AI assistant or answer engine sees it. One anonymous request per public page, no JavaScript, no logins, nothing that is not already published. The same tests were applied to every site on the same day, 15 September 2026.
Of the 75 websites we tried, 70 returned a readable page and are in the figures above. The other five did not, a mixture of domains that no longer resolve, an expired certificate, a server error and one timeout. That is the cleanest result of the five sectors we scanned.
Sites that served nothing to a plain request were retried with a browser identity, to separate a site that is genuinely down from one that refuses anything that is not a browser. That distinction matters, because a site that only answers browsers is invisible to most AI crawlers by configuration rather than by content.
No firm is named here and no individual score is published. If your firm is in this index and you want your own result, ask and we will send it, whether or not you want anything else from us.
The honest part
What a score does not tell you
A low score does not mean a bad firm. Plenty of the lower scoring practices here are long established and busy, and win work through estate agent referral and repeat instruction rather than search. If that describes you, this page is information rather than a problem.
Nothing here is a comment on RICS compliance. We tested whether published information is machine readable, which the standards do not require and which no firm can be criticised for under them. The Home Survey Standard was written before this mattered.
These tests measure only what a machine can read on one day. They do not measure whether an assistant recommends you when somebody asks for a surveyor in Dorking, which depends on what is written about you elsewhere as much as on your own website.
We built the scanner, so we have an obvious interest in what it measures. The tests are public standards rather than our invention, and where one is for something new that almost nobody has adopted, we have said so on this page instead of quietly counting it against people.
See where your firm sits
The same scan used for this index is free on your own website. About a minute, the same tests, the same score, and a list of what to fix first.
In this index and want your own result? Email dev@shopstartup.co.uk with your domain and we will send it.