An international programme of original research measuring how AI systems access, understand, and cite business websites. Every study uses a single versioned, reproducible methodology, so markets and findings can be compared like for like. This page is the map of the whole programme.
As discovery shifts from search results to AI-generated answers, whether a business can be found now depends on whether AI systems can reach, understand, and cite it. The Benchmark Series measures that, market by market, using instruments that are frozen and documented before each study runs. Results are published openly, with the underlying methodology versioned so any finding can be traced to the exact instrument that produced it.
The series is published by the Periodic Table of Digital Authority (PTODA), the methodology owner. The current generation of studies runs on the PTODA C01 Crawler, a deterministic robots.txt access scanner. Each market is a separate volume; the cross-market analysis synthesises them.
The C01 Crawler tests how a defined sample of business websites responds to 21 AI user-agents — 14 retrieval-and-citation crawlers (the ones AI search uses to discover and quote content) and 7 training crawlers, reported separately. It separates an observable crawler policy (a decision declared in robots.txt) from infrastructure non-response (an access-denied or unreachable result), and reports the two as distinct layers so neither over-counts the other.
The methodology is fully documented and versioned. Read the C01 Crawler methodology (v1.2) →
Four country volumes, each on the harmonised v1.2 methodology, listed by market size.
Roles & attribution: Douglas Lord (researcher, author) · Periodic Table of Digital Authority (publisher & methodology owner) · PTODA C01 Crawler (research instrument) · AUTHORITY44™ (commercial operator) · Digital Dominator Pty Ltd ABN 28 616 931 116 (operating entity). Douglas Lord is founder of both PTODA and AUTHORITY44; this relationship is disclosed in full. This research publishes aggregate, anonymised findings only — no named individual site results are published.
The Periodic Table of Digital Authority™ (TM 2644497) and AUTHORITY44™ (TM 2643932) are trade marks pending. You may cite findings with attribution. You may not reproduce studies in full or present findings as your own work. Use is subject to the Terms of Use.