Indonesia's biggest brands are nearly invisible to AI search, I scored 9 of them

Ask ChatGPT "best marketplace in Indonesia" or "which bank has the best savings account" and it has to quote some website. So I checked whose site it actually can quote, and the household names are losing.

Background, why I built this

I built a GEO audit agent that scores any URL 0-100 on how ready it is to be cited inside AI answers (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity). I'd already run it on fried-chicken chains. This time I pointed it at two sectors every Indonesian touches daily: e-commerce marketplaces and banks. The bigger the brand, I assumed, the better the setup. Wrong.

What

A head-to-head GEO audit of nine of Indonesia's most-used sites, five marketplaces (Tokopedia, Shopee, Bukalapak, Blibli, Lazada) and four banks (BCA, BRI, Bank Mandiri, BNI), scoring each on whether an AI assistant can crawl, parse, and quote it.

Why it matters

AI search doesn't show ten links, it reads a few sources and quotes them. When a model answers "where should I shop" or "which bank," it pulls from the sites it can actually read. A market leader with a JavaScript-locked, schema-less site simply isn't in that answer, and a smaller, well-built competitor takes the slot. Market share doesn't transfer to AI citations automatically; readability does.

Who it's for

Brand and growth teams who assume "we're the biggest, of course AI mentions us," and the smaller players who can quietly out-optimise them. Fame is not the same as being citable.

When & where

Run live against the public Indonesian sites, June 2026. The audit checks each homepage plus the domain root (robots, llms.txt, sitemap) in one pass.

How, the marketplaces

Same seven weighted checks: AI-bot access, llms.txt, sitemap, structured data, crawlable content, answer structure, meta. Here's where each store wins or leaks:

• Shopee, Indonesia's most-used marketplace, is Invisible (14). A bot reaches the door and finds an almost-empty JavaScript shell: ~10 words of real HTML, no schema, no sitemap. The biggest store is the hardest to quote.
• Tokopedia is Weak (37) and partly self-inflicted. Its robots.txt scores 10, it's actively discouraging crawlers, and the homepage is JS-rendered. Good schema can't save a page a bot can't read.
• Underdogs lead. Blibli (70) and Bukalapak (61) are the most AI-ready, crawlable HTML, a sitemap, clean structure. The smaller names did the boring things right.
• The whole column is red on one file. Not one of the five has an llms.txt. That's an open lane: the first marketplace to ship a clean LLM map becomes the easy source to cite.

How, the banks

Same audit, even starker result:

• Two of the four are Invisible (0). The bot couldn't even fetch bri.co.id or bni.co.id, blocked or JS-locked at the front door. If a crawler can't load your page, you don't exist to AI search, full stop. (These are two of the largest banks in the country.)
• BCA leads (54) and is the rare exception, it actually ships an llms.txt and a sitemap, the only brand across both sectors to do so. Still no structured data, so it's "Weak," but it's ahead by simply trying.
• Bank Mandiri (53) is crawlable with decent answer structure but has no sitemap and no schema, findable, not optimised.

The pattern across both sectors

Nine of Indonesia's biggest digital brands, and the scoreboard tells one story:

• Size is anti-correlated with readiness here. The most-used marketplace (Shopee) and two giant banks (BRI, BNI) score at the very bottom, their apps are great, their websites are invisible to AI.
• llms.txt is basically unclaimed. 8 of 9 sites score 0 on it. The single cheapest GEO win in the country is sitting untouched.
• JavaScript is the silent killer. Most low scores trace back to one thing: the real content lives behind JS that AI crawlers don't run. Server-rendered HTML alone would lift several of these by 30+ points.

The takeaway

In AI search, the question isn't "who's the biggest brand", it's "whose website can the model actually read." Right now in Indonesia, the answer is: mostly the underdogs. The giants are spending on apps and ads while leaving the AI answer slot wide open. For a smaller player, that gap is the whole opportunity, be the clean, readable, llms.txt-equipped source, and you get quoted where the market leader can't.

→ Run the free GEO audit on your own site, paste a URL, get the 0-100 score and the exact fixes in one pass. No sign-up.

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Honest limits: a low score means low readiness, not that the brand never appears, AI also pulls from third-party reviews, maps, news, and aggregators. This audits each brand's own site, live, and configs change. Two banks scored 0 because the homepage was unreachable to the crawler at audit time; that's a fetch/config issue, not a statement about the institution.