What we found on 936 PE-backed software company websites

Short answer. In October 2026 Kennext read 8,818 pages on 936 software company websites owned by private equity firms. 48% had a heading problem on at least one page, 37% had at least one page with a missing or duplicated meta description, and 51% had no llms.txt file. These are the basics, and they sit on the homepage and the pages nearest it.

What we checked

We ran a light pre-scan on 1,016 websites of PE-backed software companies, mostly in the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada. 936 answered. On each one we read up to 10 pages, starting from the homepage, one page at a time and following robots.txt. That gave us 8,818 pages.

This is not Kennext's full scan, which runs about 70 checks. It is a short list of basic checks, the kind a marketing team can fix in an afternoon.

The five numbers

• 48% have a heading problem. On 445 of 936 sites, at least one page had no H1 or more than one. 229 sites had a page with no H1 at all, and 287 had a page with two or more.
• 37% have a missing or duplicated meta description. That is 343 of 936 sites. 253 had at least one page with no meta description, and 123 used the same description on two or more pages.
• One page in ten has no meta description at all. 906 of the 8,818 pages we read.
• 59% have a description long enough to be cut off. 555 sites had at least one meta description over 160 characters, 1,592 pages in all.
• 51% have no llms.txt. 474 of the 924 sites that answered the request.

A few more from the same sample

• 18% of sites (165) had a page with under 300 words of text.
• 11% (100) used the same title tag on two or more pages.
• 4% (37) had a canonical tag pointing at a different URL.
• 9 sites had a page with no title tag, and 2 still do not redirect http to https.

Why these matter

Headings. The H1 is the page saying what it is about. Search engines use headings to understand a page, and a page with no H1, or three of them, leaves that to guesswork.

Meta descriptions. The meta description is the one-line summary you write for a page. Search results often show it. When it is missing, the search engine writes its own. When two pages share one, neither says what makes it different.

llms.txt. It is a proposed standard, and Google, OpenAI, Perplexity and Anthropic have not publicly confirmed that they use it. We still count it because it costs almost nothing to add and it makes you write one clear paragraph about what you sell. Treat it as cheap insurance, not a ranking factor.

Long descriptions. This is the most common finding and the least urgent. A description that runs long gets trimmed, not ignored. Fix the others before this one.

What this means if you run marketing at a software company

None of this needs an agency or a rebuild. Most of it is a content edit in your CMS. The hard part is knowing which pages have the problem, and making sure the fix is still there after the next site update.

How we did it, and what it can't tell you

• The sample is 1,016 PE-backed software companies we researched as prospects, scanned between 21 and 27 October 2026. It is not a random sample of B2B SaaS.
• We read about 10 pages per site, the homepage and the pages nearest it. A site counts when at least one of those pages has the problem. We did not measure the share of the whole site.
• llms.txt counts as missing when /llms.txt returned an error, or an HTML page instead of a text file. The 12 sites where the request failed outright are left out of that count.
• 80 sites could not be read at all (firewalls, connection errors or empty responses) and are not in any number here.
• This pre-scan did not record robots.txt rules or structured data, so it says nothing about AI bot blocking or schema. Kennext's full scan checks both.

Check your own site

Kennext runs these checks, and about 70 SEO and AEO checks in all, on your site every day. On a paid plan it writes the fix for your platform, and on the Fix plan it applies the fixes you approve on WordPress, HubSpot and Webflow, then checks them on the next scan. Run a free scan to see your scores and issue count.