centuryauto.com — AI Site Grade

Analysis

Crawler Access: Selective Blockade

The site serves a 403 Access Denied from Akamai to every major AI crawler tested -- GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, ChatGPT-User, OAI-SearchBot, Applebot-Extended, and Bytespider all receive the same AkamaiGHost wall. The sole exception is anthropic-ai, which gets a 200 with 461KB of HTML served from nginx. This creates a bizarre asymmetry: Claude can read the full site while every other AI engine -- including Google, OpenAI, and Perplexity -- sees nothing. No robots.txt or llms.txt file resolves (connection refused), meaning there is no explicit crawl policy anywhere on the domain.

Cold-Knowledge Gap: Near-Total Invisibility

LLM knowledge of "Century Auto" is essentially blank -- the model reports no specific awareness of the brand, no notable products, awards, or reputation signals. This is consistent with the site's external footprint: web searches for centuryauto.com, "Century Automotive Group Huntsville," and the dealership's brand affiliations (BMW, Porsche, Land Rover, Jaguar, Volvo) return zero indexed results. The site has no Wayback Machine snapshots, no review mentions, no Reddit threads, no press coverage discoverable through search. A dealership selling five luxury European brands in a mid-sized Alabama city is functionally invisible to the open web.

Content and Schema Posture

The homepage title reads "New and Used Cars Huntsville AL | Century Automotive Group." The site runs on the Dealer.com (DDC) platform and is heavily JS-dependent -- a plain GET returns only a 15-word Akamai error page. The anthropic-ai bot reveals the site sells BMW, Porsche, Land Rover, Jaguar, and Volvo vehicles. The sitemap (accessible only to anthropic-ai) lists inventory, showroom, specials, and service pages, but the /about/index.htm and /contact/index.htm paths both return 404 pages (titled "Oops!"). No JSON-LD schema was detected on any fetched page. The site has meta name="robots" content="index, follow" on key pages, but this directive is meaningless when every crawler except one is blocked at the CDN edge.

External Signals: Zero

No external mentions, reviews, directory listings, or press references for centuryauto.com or "Century Automotive Group" were found across multiple search queries. The domain's DNS shows Microsoft 365 mail and GoDaddy nameservers. The site's Akamai configuration blocks all non-Anthropic bot traffic at the edge, which explains the total absence from search engine indexes and LLM training corpora. The dealership is effectively running a private website that only human browsers (and Claude) can access.

Findings

1. Akamai blocks all major AI crawlers except Claude High

   The site serves a 403 Access Denied from Akamai to GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, ChatGPT-User, OAI-SearchBot, Applebot-Extended, and Bytespider. Only anthropic-ai receives a 200 response with full HTML content.

   What to change: Reconfigure Akamai to allow access for all major AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, etc.) or implement a robots.txt policy that selectively permits them.

2. No robots.txt or llms.txt file resolves High

   Both /robots.txt and /llms.txt return connection refused errors, meaning there is no explicit crawl policy or AI-specific guidance available on the domain.

   What to change: Create and serve a robots.txt file that allows all major AI crawlers, and optionally an llms.txt file to guide AI tools.

3. Zero search engine indexing for the domain High

   Web searches for centuryauto.com, 'Century Automotive Group Huntsville', and related queries return zero results. The site has no presence in Google, Bing, or other search engines.

   What to change: Allow all major crawlers through Akamai and ensure pages are indexable. Submit the sitemap to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.

4. No external mentions, reviews, or backlinks found High

   Multiple web searches for the dealership name, brand affiliations, and domain found zero external mentions, reviews, directory listings, or press references. The site has no backlink profile.

   What to change: Build an external presence through local business directories, press releases, social media, and customer review platforms. Encourage backlinks from reputable automotive sites.

5. LLM knowledge of Century Auto is blank Medium

   The AI model reports no specific knowledge about Century Auto, its products, awards, or reputation. This is consistent with the site's lack of indexing and external signals.

   What to change: Improve overall web visibility to ensure the brand appears in AI training data and knowledge bases.

6. No JSON-LD schema detected on any fetched page Medium

   Structured data in JSON-LD format was not found on the homepage, inventory pages, or sitemap. This limits the site's ability to provide rich snippets and entity information to search engines and AI.

   What to change: Add JSON-LD structured data for Organization, LocalBusiness, and VehicleOffer schemas on relevant pages.

7. About and contact pages return 404 errors Medium

   The /about/index.htm and /contact/index.htm paths return 404 pages titled 'Oops!', indicating broken or missing content that should be available to users and crawlers.

   What to change: Restore or redirect the about and contact pages to working URLs with meaningful content.

8. No Wayback Machine snapshots exist for the domain Low

   The Internet Archive has no snapshots of centuryauto.com, indicating the site has never been archived or was blocked from crawling historically.

   What to change: Allow crawlers to access the site so it can be archived by the Wayback Machine and other services.

What's working

• Claude can access the full site with rich content — The anthropic-ai bot receives a 200 response with 461KB of HTML, including inventory, showroom, and service pages. This allows Claude to read the site's content for AI training and retrieval.
• Sitemap accessible to Claude with 109KB of URLs — The sitemap.xml is served to anthropic-ai and contains 109KB of URLs, listing inventory, showroom, specials, and service pages. This helps Claude discover the site's structure.
• Meta robots index, follow present on key pages — Key pages include <meta name="robots" content="index, follow">, indicating the site intends to be indexed. This is a positive signal once crawler access is granted.
• Site runs on Dealer.com (DDC) platform — The site uses the Dealer.com platform, which is a reputable automotive CMS with built-in SEO features. This provides a solid foundation for future optimization.