I scanned 15 Indian interior design firms for AI visibility

On 2 August 2026 I ran 15 Indian interior design firm homepages through my AI readability scanner, the same public engine behind the free Report Card tool on this site. The sample covers three kinds of firm: tech enabled platforms built app first and venture funded, boutique design studios, and regional firms. The headline is that this vertical is bimodal. Seven firms scored an A, two scored an F, and almost nobody landed in the middle. The split tracks business model almost perfectly: platforms that treat their website as a product score high, while design led studios, whose whole craft is how things look, often build sites that say almost nothing to a machine.

A bimodal result: a strong cluster, a weak cluster, almost nothing between

Across all 15 firms the median score was 78 out of 100, with a mean of 73.9 and a range from 23 to 100. One firm hit a perfect 100. But that median hides the real shape of the data. Seven firms scored an A (85 or above), five scored a B, one scored a D, and two scored an F. Zero firms scored a C. There is a strong cluster at the top and a weak cluster at the bottom, and very little in between.

The split lines up with what kind of firm it is. The nine tech enabled platforms, the app and web led businesses that raised venture money to build a product, scored a median of 92. The three boutique design studios scored a median of 78. The three regional firms scored a median of 71. Being good at interior design and being readable to an AI engine turned out to be almost independent skills.

Structured data is the dividing line, and it's the widest gap I've measured

Twelve of the 15 firms publish structured data (JSON-LD) on their homepage, and those 12 have a median score of 87. The three that don't scored 23, 23 and 39, a median of just 23. That is a 64 point gap tied to a single signal, the widest gap I have measured in any vertical I've scanned so far.

Structured data is how a page tells an AI engine what it's actually looking at: this is a business, here is its name, here is what it does, here is where it operates. Without it, an engine has to guess from prose and layout, which is slower and less reliable, and a guess that goes wrong means the firm doesn't get named in the answer at all.

The irony: the firms whose whole craft is visuals often build the least readable sites

Only 3 of the 15 firms have FAQ schema, and only 5 of the 15 have a single clear H1 heading. Both are small technical fixes, and both were more common on the platforms than on the studios.

Here is the part worth sitting with. These are firms selling visual craft, and yet the design led studios and regional firms, the ones whose product is literally how a room looks, are the ones most likely to build a site that looks beautiful to a person and says almost nothing to a machine. A gorgeous homepage and a machine readable homepage are different problems, and this vertical shows that more starkly than any I have scanned.

FAQ schema and a clear H1 matter because they are what let an AI engine lift a direct answer. If someone asks an AI assistant what does a full home interior cost, or how long does a project take, an engine can only quote a firm's own answer if that answer exists on the page in a form it can parse, not buried in a photo gallery or a vague paragraph.

The smaller gaps in the sample:

• A single clear H1 heading appears on only 5 of the 15 sites.
• FAQ schema, which AI engines lift answers from, appears on just 3 sites.
• Open Graph tags, for link previews, are missing from 4 of 15 sites.
• The 3 sites without structured data scored 23, 23 and 39, all failing grades.

What to fix, for the sites still behind

1. Add JSON-LD structured data first: it's the single biggest lever, worth up to 64 points in this sample.
2. Use a schema generator to build valid JSON-LD for your business, services and location without hand coding it.
3. Give every page a single clear H1 heading instead of stacking headings for the design.
4. Add FAQPage schema for the questions clients actually ask: cost, timeline, warranty, cities served.
5. Add Open Graph tags so links to your site preview correctly, then rerun the free Report Card tool to confirm your score moved.

Method and limits

This is 15 real interior design firm homepages, scanned live on 2 August 2026 with the same public engine anyone can run on this site. It looks only at the homepage, not the full site, so it is a snapshot of one page, not a verdict on the whole business. The results are reported anonymously and in aggregate, no firm is named. The sample also skews toward larger, more visible firms, the ones easiest to find and scan, so the long tail of small local studios not in this list is likely to score weaker, not stronger.

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