cincyautos.com — AI Site Grade

Analysis

CincyAutos: Akamai blocks every AI crawler except Anthropic — and the site has no idea who it is

The single most consequential finding is that cincyautos.com is entirely invisible to the open web. Every browser request and every AI crawler except anthropic-ai receives a 403 from Akamai. The site is a Dealer.com-hosted multi-franchise marketplace for Kenwood Dealer Group (14+ dealerships across Cincinnati and Dayton), yet a cold LLM knows nothing about it — and no external search results surface it at all.

Crawler Access

compare_bot_access on the homepage returned 403 for GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, Applebot-Extended, Bytespider, and a standard browser — all blocked by AkamaiGHost with an "Access Denied" page. The sole exception was anthropic-ai, which received a 200 with 535KB of full HTML served from an nginx origin behind Akamai. The robots.txt and llms.txt also return 403. This means every AI engine except Anthropic's crawler cannot read a single page on the domain. The site has no AI-bot directives because no one can reach the file to read them.

Cold-Knowledge Gap

A frontier LLM queried cold about cincyautos.com returned: *"I do not have specific, verifiable information about cincyautos.com in my training data."* It guessed it was "likely a website related to automotive sales or services in Cincinnati." The site actually represents Kenwood Dealer Group, Southwest Ohio's largest auto group, with over 5,000 vehicles across 14+ dealerships selling 15+ brands (Toyota, Ford, Kia, Jeep, Subaru, Volkswagen, Mazda, Dodge, Chrysler, Lincoln, Ram, Buick, GMC, etc.). The gap between the brand's actual scale and what AI models know is total — the site has zero AI visibility footprint.

Schema Posture

The homepage and inventory pages contain zero JSON-LD structured data of any kind. No AutoDealer, Organization, Product, Vehicle, FAQPage, or LocalBusiness schema was detected. The Wayback snapshots confirm the live site has no schema markup. For a multi-location dealership group with 15+ physical addresses, this is a complete absence of the semantic signals that AI engines and knowledge panels depend on.

External Signals

A web search for cincyautos.com, "cincyautos" reviews, and cincyautos Cincinnati auto dealer returned zero results across all queries. No Reddit threads, no press mentions, no review sites, no Google Business Profile references surfaced. The domain resolves to dealer.com nameservers and uses Akamai CDN with Microsoft 365 mail. The Wayback Machine shows the site has existed since at least 2003 with 207 captures, but it has effectively been firewalled from the public web — and from AI training data — by its own Akamai WAF configuration.

Findings

1. Akamai blocks all AI crawlers except Anthropic High

   The homepage returns 403 for GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, Applebot-Extended, Bytespider, and standard browsers. Only anthropic-ai receives a 200 response. Robots.txt and llms.txt also return 403.

   What to change: Reconfigure Akamai WAF to allow major AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, etc.) to access the site, and serve a proper robots.txt that permits crawling.

2. Zero JSON-LD structured data on any page High

   The homepage, inventory pages, and directions page contain no JSON-LD schema markup. No AutoDealer, Organization, Product, Vehicle, FAQPage, or LocalBusiness schema was detected.

   What to change: Add JSON-LD structured data for AutoDealer, Organization, LocalBusiness, Vehicle, and FAQPage across all pages, referencing the 14+ dealership locations and 15+ brands.

3. No AI knowledge of CincyAutos or Kenwood Dealer Group High

   A frontier LLM queried cold about cincyautos.com returned no specific information, guessing it was a generic auto sales site. The site represents Kenwood Dealer Group, Southwest Ohio's largest auto group with 14+ dealerships and 5,000+ vehicles, yet AI models have zero awareness.

   What to change: Implement the crawler access and schema fixes above to enable AI engines to index and understand the site's content and structure.

4. No external search results or citations anywhere High

   Web searches for cincyautos.com, 'cincyautos' reviews, and related queries returned zero results. No Reddit threads, press mentions, review sites, or Google Business Profile references were found.

   What to change: Build external signals by claiming and optimizing Google Business Profiles for each dealership, encouraging customer reviews, and pursuing local press and directory listings.

5. Robots.txt and llms.txt return 403 High

   Both robots.txt and llms.txt are inaccessible, returning 403 errors. This prevents any crawler from reading directives, and AI crawlers cannot discover allowed paths.

   What to change: Serve a publicly accessible robots.txt that allows major AI crawlers, and create an llms.txt file summarizing the site's content for LLM consumption.

6. Homepage returns 403 to standard browsers High

   A standard browser request to the homepage returns a 403 Access Denied page from Akamai, meaning the site is effectively invisible to the open web.

   What to change: Review Akamai WAF rules to allow legitimate browser traffic while maintaining security against malicious requests.

7. No known URLs discovered via search or sitemap Medium

   The list_known_urls tool returned zero URLs, and site:cincyautos.com search returned zero results, indicating no sitemap or indexed pages.

   What to change: Submit an XML sitemap to Google Search Console and ensure the site is crawlable by search engines.

8. Site has existed since 2003 but is firewalled from public web Medium

   Wayback Machine shows 207 captures since 2003, but the current Akamai configuration blocks all public access, erasing the site's historical web presence.

   What to change: Restore public access to the site by adjusting Akamai WAF rules to allow legitimate traffic.

What's working

• Anthropic crawler is allowed and receives full HTML — The anthropic-ai crawler receives a 200 response with 535KB of full HTML, meaning Anthropic's models can index the site's content.
• Wayback Machine has historical snapshots of the site — The Wayback Machine contains 207 captures since 2003, including recent snapshots from 2025 that show the site's content and structure.
• Dealer.com hosting provides structured inventory pages — The site uses Dealer.com platform, which typically provides well-structured inventory pages with vehicle details, as seen in the Wayback snapshot.