Agents also used up to 6x more tokens on inaccessible sites. Digital accessibility makes a site compliant and AI-ready.
TUCSON, Ariz., Sept. 24, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- AudioEye, Inc. (Nasdaq: AEYE) ("AudioEye" or the "Company"), an industry-leading digital accessibility company, today published new research showing that website accessibility is directly connected to AI readiness. The study sent 1,560 AI agents to complete everyday tasks on six websites, once with accessibility fixes in place and once without.
On the site with the most accessibility issues, agents completed just 31% of assigned tasks. On an accessible version of the same site, agents completed 96%. Task completion dropped by about two-thirds for every model tested on the inaccessible site, including the most advanced models.
AI agents read a webpage using its accessibility tree, a digital map of the webpage's content. When the map is incomplete, the agent cannot finish what it came to do. Tasks fail, and the customer never gets the answer, the booking, or the purchase they sent the agent to complete.
Key findings
- Task completion fell by up to 68% on inaccessible websites. Agents completed 96% of tasks on an accessible site and 31% on an inaccessible version of the same site. Accessibility was the only difference between the two versions.
- Agents used 43% more tokens on average on inaccessible sites, and up to 6x at the extreme. Across all 1,560 tests, the median run consumed 43% more compute when accessibility fixes were absent (90,000 vs. 128,000 tokens), a gap AudioEye calls the compute tax. On the site with the most accessibility issues, every model used at least 2x as many tokens without accessibility fixes, and the highest-cost model used 6x as many.
- Missing accessibility labels stopped every model tested. For example, one task needed numbers that appeared only inside an image, and that image had no text description in the code. No agent could read them. Six models tried it ten times each, and all 60 attempts failed. That is the problem in one example: if the code is inaccessible, the software has nothing to read.
AI readiness starts with accessibility
In September 2026, Meta launched Muse, a personal AI agent designed to act on users' behalf, including sending emails, filling out forms, booking travel, and making purchases. Meta's family of apps reaches more than 3.6 billion people daily, giving the company significant reach as AI agents become more common, alongside products such as Instinct and Grokbot.
"The number of agents using the internet is expected to increase exponentially. However, agents use a website's accessibility tree, not the DOM, which powers web browsers. A core part of AI readiness in the future will be having an accessibility solution, not just for compliance, but for the agents themselves," said Kelly Georgevich, CEO of AudioEye. "Our research shows that even the most advanced AI model can fail outright on an inaccessible page. The accessibility investment our customers make for compliance turns out to be the groundwork for the agentic web, and AudioEye is built to make websites AI-ready at scale for businesses of all sizes."
Companies build accessible websites to meet compliance standards and to serve people with disabilities, and both reasons hold as strongly as ever, driven by increasing litigation. The research adds a compelling third reason: an accessible website is legible to any software that arrives, whether a screen reader or an AI agent sent by a customer. Businesses that invest in accessibility now are building accessible websites for the customers they have today and the AI agents they will send tomorrow.
The full report is available at www.audioeye.com/post/ai-readiness-starts-with-an-accessible-website/.
Methodology
AudioEye ran 1,560 independent AI agents built from six commercial models across 13 real-world tasks on six websites. Every agent started fresh, and each test was repeated ten times. On five websites in retail, travel, and direct-to-consumer commerce, the only change was whether AudioEye's accessibility fixes loaded. The websites themselves were never modified. The sixth site is the W3C's demonstration site, published in both accessible and inaccessible versions.
Results were independently rechecked using WebJudge, an open-source evaluation system from Ohio State University's NLP group, which agreed with AudioEye's scoring 95% of the time.
About AudioEye
AudioEye exists to ensure the digital future we build is accessible for people with disabilities and AI agents. AudioEye's comprehensive solution for over 129,000 customers, combines industry-leading AI automation technology with expert fixes informed by the disability community. This powerful combination delivers industry-leading protection against lawsuits and readiness for AI agents. With 25 US patents, AudioEye's solution includes 24/7 accessibility monitoring, automated WCAG issue testing and fixes, expert testing, developer tools, and legal protection, empowering organizations to confidently create accessible digital experiences for all.
Media Contact
Mike Barton
press@audioeye.com
Investor Contact
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Gateway Group, Inc.
AEYE@gateway-grp.com
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SOURCE AudioEye, Inc.
