For years, companies treated the homepage as the front door to their websites. If it looked good, loaded quickly, and met accessibility requirements, many organizations considered the job largely done.
AI search may be changing that assumption.
According to a new report from AudioEye, AI-powered search experiences are increasingly sending visitors directly to product pages, support articles, account portals, and other interior pages instead of routing them through a carefully polished homepage first. Those deeper pages often contain more accessibility problems and, in many cases, receive far less attention from developers and compliance teams.
The report examined more than 165,000 pages across 6,100 websites in the United States and Europe and found that interior pages averaged 10 percent more accessibility issues than homepages. AudioEye points to growing evidence that AI search tools are accelerating the shift toward deep linking, with users landing directly on the pages where those issues are most likely to exist.
If that trend continues, businesses could face an uncomfortable reality. The pages attracting the most traffic from AI assistants and search engines may also be the pages creating the biggest legal and financial risks.
AudioEye says the average webpage contains 62 accessibility issues, while roughly one in five problems can prevent visitors from completing important actions such as making purchases, filling out forms, or accessing account information.
Some of the most common problems are hardly new. Missing image descriptions, unlabeled buttons, unclear links, poor color contrast, and missing navigation shortcuts have frustrated users for years. The difference now is that AI search may be increasing exposure to those shortcomings rather than hiding them behind a homepage that receives most of the attention.
There is also reason to be cautious about some of the report’s conclusions. AI search engines are not intentionally selecting inaccessible pages. Rather, they are increasingly surfacing the pages users actually want, whether that is a product listing, troubleshooting guide, pricing page, or checkout screen. If those pages happen to be less accessible, the underlying issue belongs to the website itself rather than the AI system pointing people toward it.
Still, the broader warning feels difficult to ignore.
The rise of AI search could force organizations to rethink what accessibility means in practice. Instead of treating compliance as a homepage exercise or an annual audit, businesses may need to assume that every page is now a landing page.
That shift may ultimately improve the web for everyone. But for companies that have ignored accessibility beyond the front page, AI could expose problems that have been hiding in plain sight for years.
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