Top Score: 6/10. We Scored Every Pro Sports Team in the World on AI Visibility.
I run Engagemii, a platform that scores websites on AEO, or Answer Engine Optimization, which measures how readable, citeable, and discoverable a site is to ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and other AI engines.
We have scored 1.67 million websites so far. This past weekend I scored every major professional sports team in the world.
441 teams. NBA, WNBA, NFL, MLB, NHL, MLS, Premier League, La Liga, Serie A, Bundesliga, Ligue 1, Formula 1, NASCAR, MotoGP, IPL, AFL, NRL, NCAA Division 1 football and basketball, top global esports organizations. The complete roster of multi-billion-dollar global brands competing for attention every day on national television.
The top score across the entire dataset: 6/10. Not one team, not one franchise, cracked 7.
AEO scoreboard: top score across 441 pro sports teams worldwide is 6/10. Source: Engagemii research, June 2026.
The 6/10 scorers were a mix of NCAA programs (UConn basketball, Auburn football, Iowa, Clemson), an esports org (100 Thieves), a tennis major (Roland-Garros), and a couple of rugby and AFL clubs. That is it. Everyone else scored 5 or below.
The NBA, specifically, caps at 5/10. Every single NBA team, Lakers, Knicks, Celtics, Warriors, all 30 of them, sits at 5. They are tied with random small businesses we audit every day. Sites that have never had a marketing department.
The Spurs do not have a website
The more interesting finding came when I tried to score the Spurs.
Eight NBA teams, the Spurs, Heat, Magic, Pelicans, Kings, Wizards, Timberwolves, and Nets, do not have their own website. They only exist as subpaths on nba.com. When you ask ChatGPT about the Spurs, the AI is reading the exact same source page as it reads for the Knicks, the Lakers, or any other team in the league. There is no individual Spurs page on the internet for AI to find.
The same pattern shows up in MLB. Every team I checked, Yankees, Dodgers, Mets, Red Sox, all of them, is hosted at mlb.com/[team]. Same for the NHL at nhl.com/[team].
These are not small businesses. The Spurs alone are valued at well over $3 billion. They are sharing a website with 29 other teams.
If you ask "what is the Spurs' approach to player development," AI search has nowhere unique to look. It pulls from the umbrella nba.com page, which contains generic NBA content alongside identical team summaries. The result is indistinguishable from what you'd get asking about any other NBA team.
What AEO actually measures
This is what AEO is trying to fix.
The score (0 to 10) is a composite measure of how readable a site is to language models. Inputs include semantic HTML structure, schema markup (Organization, Product, FAQ), descriptive metadata, content depth, robots.txt and llms.txt configuration, sitemap quality, and citation worthiness. It is the same idea SEO captured 20 years ago for human search engines, except now the search engine is a probabilistic model deciding which businesses to mention.
If the NBA has not optimized for AI search, and the data says it has not, your small business almost certainly has not either. The difference is the NBA can afford not to. You probably cannot.
Free AEO score for any site at engagemii.com/aeo.
Sports rankings, all 441 teams, are at engagemii.com/aeo/sports.
About this analysis
Teams were scored on 2026-06-07 and 2026-06-08 using Engagemii's standard AEO scoring pipeline. The full dataset of 441 team scores, plus rankings by league and sport, is at engagemii.com/aeo/sports. The same scoring methodology and 0-to-10 scale used here is the same one we apply to every brand in the broader 1.67M-site directory. If you want to cite this article, the URL is engagemii.com/blog/every-pro-sports-team-aeo-top-score-six-out-of-ten.
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