Only 8 of 936 VCL Projects Met All Three Website Benchmarks
8 of 936 measured custom-domain project URLs met VCL’s chosen backlink, Lighthouse and agent-readiness thresholds together. See the full overlap.
Eight of 936 custom-domain project URLs with all three measurements—0.9%—met VCL’s chosen thresholds for backlink strength, page performance and agent readiness together. Another 325, or 34.7%, met none of them.
The full overlap shows how different these measurements are. A project can meet one threshold while missing the others; one score is not a substitute for all three checks.
*Analysis updated October 23, 2026. Dataset v9; measurement cutoff October 1, 2026 at 00:00 UTC.*
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What the three thresholds mean
- Ahrefs Domain Rating ≥10: a low backlink-strength reference point chosen by VCL.
- Lighthouse performance ≥90: the published boundary for Lighthouse’s “Good” band.
- Cloudflare Agent Readiness ≥L2: beyond the scanner’s first two levels, L0 and L1.
These thresholds are explicit editorial choices for this report. Changing them would change the overlap. They are not a universal launch checklist or a product-success score.
The complete overlap
Unlike the report’s multi-select category tables, these rows are mutually exclusive. Every measured project URL appears once.
| Thresholds met | Project URLs | Share of 936 measured URLs |
|---|---|---|
| None | 325 | 34.7% |
| Ahrefs DR only | 306 | 32.7% |
| Lighthouse only | 122 | 13.0% |
| Agent Readiness only | 34 | 3.6% |
| Ahrefs DR + Lighthouse only | 77 | 8.2% |
| Ahrefs DR + Agent Readiness only | 56 | 6.0% |
| Lighthouse + Agent Readiness only | 8 | 0.9% |
| All three | 8 | 0.9% |
The analysis covers 936 of 1,020 eligible custom-domain project URLs, or 91.8%. The 84 without all three measurements are excluded; they are not counted as failing a threshold. Percentages may not sum to exactly 100% because of rounding.
Three measurements, three different questions
Domain Rating concerns the backlink profile of the registrable domain. Lighthouse describes a desktop lab run on the submitted page. Agent Readiness is the provider’s recorded level for that URL, rather than a test of an agent completing an authenticated task.
The scores can come from different dates. Multiple project URLs may also inherit the same domain’s DR. This is a descriptive comparison, not an independence test, a causal analysis or evidence that AI coding caused the results.
In particular, 0.9% is not a product success rate. The report does not use these checks to measure revenue, retention, security or overall product quality. Its contribution is to make the overlap visible and keep the separate measurements understandable.
A statistic to cite
In VCL Research’s dataset v9, 8 of 936 custom-domain project URLs with complete measurements (0.9%) met Ahrefs DR ≥10, Lighthouse performance ≥90 and Cloudflare Agent Readiness ≥L2 together.
Data and source. State of Vibe Coding 2026, Dataset v9: benchmark overlap, cutoff October 1, 2026 at 00:00 UTC. See the methodology and full report. When sharing the chart, please credit VCL Research and link to this article or the versioned figure.