AFC Bournemouth top the Premier League in a new independent index of all twenty club stores

MANCHESTER, U.K. - EntSun -- Barking Cat Advisory has published Edition Two of the Commercial Experience Index, scoring all twenty Premier League club online stores out of 100 across eight observable measures, read entirely from the front of each store in August 2026.

AFC Bournemouth top the table at 73, the only club strong on both what a customer meets and what a machine meets. The next nineteen sit between 57 and 72, with fourteen inside a six-point band. Chelsea (72), Leeds United (70), Arsenal and Liverpool (69) follow. Brentford sit twentieth at 57.

The edition's central finding is a split. Arsenal, Chelsea and Liverpool run some of the best customer experiences in the league and expose almost nothing an AI agent can read: Arsenal score 3.5 out of 10 on AI Readiness, Chelsea 4.5. An llms.txt agent-instruction file was found on exactly four of the twenty stores, all of them on Shopify, and every other store, including all five enterprise platforms run by the biggest clubs, returned a 404. Liverpool's structured data serves a price of 150 US dollars to the crawler while the shopper sees 120 pounds.

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The measures where the establishment trails are the two the market is moving toward. On mobile performance the smaller clubs run the fastest stores and the giants the slowest, with Manchester City lowest at 4.1. On AI Readiness, Bournemouth (9.0), Nottingham Forest (8.0) and Ipswich Town (7.8) lead; Crystal Palace and Brentford sit at 2.5.

Steve Webster, founder of Barking Cat Advisory, said: "The famous clubs do not run bad stores. They run stores that are good for humans and poor for machines. The separation at the top of Premier League retail is no longer about how well you sell to a person, because most of these clubs do that competently. It is about whether you have also built for the machine that is increasingly standing between the club and the supporter, and on that measure the establishment is behind a promoted-era coastal club."

The Index scores eight lenses: Proposition and Brand Clarity, Experience and Merchandising, Persuasion and Buyer Journey, Checkout and Friction, Copy and Voice, Performance, SEO Readiness and AI Readiness. Five are operator judgement and three read objective site behaviour. Guest checkout was found at all twenty clubs; no transaction was placed. The Index does not see traffic, conversion, margin or the profit and loss, and does not measure whether AI assistants currently recommend a club.

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The full edition, twenty-six pages with every club written up in rank order and the complete methodology, is published free at https://barkingcat.ai/thinking/commercial-experience-index-edition-two/