Across 14,208 scans this quarter, the median B2B supplier scores 38/100. We broke down what separates the top five percent from everyone else — and it isn't what most people expect.
When we started Helo, we assumed the fail-state was structural data: missing schema.org, no JSON-LD, no llms.txt. Twelve thousand scans in, the data says something different. The cliff isn't at data — it's at protocol.
Across 14,208 domains scanned between January and April 2026, scores cluster tightly around the median with long tails on both ends. The top 5% — 710 sites — all score above 78. The bottom 10% — 1,421 sites — all score below 15.
The middle of the distribution is where most of the story lives. These sites have somestructured data — enough to prove they've heard of schema.org — but fail the harder tests.
Every domain scoring above 78 implements either AP2 endpoints, MCP-over-HTTPS, or an OpenAPI 3.1 description with a live /.well-knownentry. This isn't correlation — it's the single highest-weighted criterion in our scorecard.
“Protocol support isn't a feature an agent asks for politely. It's the thing the crawler tries first, and when it's absent, your site is effectively read-only.”
Sites scoring 30–60 almost always implement Product schema on marketing pages — but have no machine-readable catalog, no sitemap beyond HTML pages, and no programmatic way to get a current price. For an agent, this is a brochure, not a store.
products.json or feed endpoint — 82% of the middle bandThe correlation between “last-modified” headers older than 180 days and a score drop of 15+ points is one of the cleanest we've seen. Agents penalize stale content heavily — more than we expected when we first calibrated the scorer.
Site owners tend to invest heavily in trust badges, testimonial carousels, and press logos. Agents can't see any of it. What they can see — SSL posture, WHOIS age, verified organization schema — is often missing even on sites with rich visual trust surfaces.
If your site scores in the middle band, the highest-leverage change is publishing a single machine-readable catalog at a stable URL. That one change, shipped across twelve sites in our pilot cohort, moved the median score from 41 to 58 — a full grade bump — within two weeks.
Everything else can wait. Schema tweaks, trust badges, even a proper llms.txt — they matter, but they're marginal until the protocol layer exists.
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