For years, making a website accessible meant starting at the homepage. However, with the rise of AI-powered search, users are now being dropped directly onto the page that answers their query, bypassing the homepage entirely. According to AudioEye’s 2026 Digital Accessibility Index (DAI), 95% of AI search traffic bypasses the homepage.
Accessibility Issues Beyond the Homepage
The 2026 DAI scanned 166,457 pages across 6,161 domains spanning seven industries in the U.S. and Europe. One of its clearest findings: The pages beyond the homepage average 10% more accessibility issues and 18% more page elements than homepages. More page elements mean more surface area for failures.
The same five issues appear on roughly 3 in 4 pages across every industry: images a screen reader cannot describe, links that give no indication of where they go, buttons and form fields that cannot be identified by assistive technology, interactive elements that are too low-contrast to see, and no way for keyboard users to skip repetitive navigation.
Consequences of Inaccessibility
Roughly one in five of those issues blocks users from completing a task entirely, with no workaround and no alternative path. For a user relying on a screen reader or keyboard navigation, that is not an inconvenience. It is a dead end.
Most accessibility programs were designed around a model that no longer reflects how users move through the web. Teams identify a set of priority pages, run periodic audits, and fix what they find. That approach worked when traffic followed a predictable path. It does not work when AI search routes users around the pages that have been reviewed.
According to AudioEye’s 2026 Accessibility Advantage Report, 44% of organizations manage accessibility internally, and 64% of those report lacking the expertise to do it well. The result is often programs concentrated on a small portion of a site, running on a schedule that cannot keep pace with how often content changes.
Original reporting: KRDO (Colorado Springs metro) — read the source article.
