Deposits · August 2026
Citi compares checking accounts fully but withholds its savings rate
An AI agent ran five ordinary deposits tasks on the public pages of Citi and scored what each page delivered.
Run 6 August 2026 · five tasks · public pages, logged out · Bank
46/100
Mystery Agent score
Deposits · rank 20 of 25
Savings rate
22Arrives after scripts
Checking comparison
90Served as text
Fee schedule
86Served as PDF
Routing number
15Arrives after scripts
Application page
17Arrives after scripts
Summary
- Citi's Compare Bank Accounts page states a $15 fee for Regular Checking and a $5 fee for Access Checking.
- Citi's robots.txt lists dedicated banking and personal banking guide sitemaps, giving an agent a direct path to real product pages.
- An AI agent read a complete comparison covering ATM fees, daily debit limits, and foreign exchange charges across four Citi checking tiers.
- Publishing today's APY as static text on the rates page would let an agent read the number without a ZIP code lookup.
Citi also appears in the Credit Cards study, where it scores 73 and ranks 11 of 25.
See that scorecard.
Task by task
Each task is scored out of 100 on completion, answer quality and how directly the answer was reached. Each note describes what the page delivered, with a link to the page the answer was found on.
Task 01Savings rateArrives after scripts22 out of 100
The current interest rates page strips down to 108 visible characters, just a title and skip link, because every rate cell is a template placeholder that binds to a number only after a ZIP code is entered.
Task 02Checking comparisonServed as text90 out of 100
The Compare Bank Accounts page states a $15 fee for Regular Checking and a $5 fee for Access Checking, each with its own waiver path, plus differing ATM fees, debit limits, and foreign exchange charges across four tiers.
Task 03Fee scheduleServed as PDF86 out of 100
The Consumer Deposit Account Agreement PDF, linked from the compare page, includes a fee schedule appendix naming stop payment, money order, official check, and wire transfer charges by tier, extracting cleanly into text.
Task 04Routing numberArrives after scripts15 out of 100
The homepage and a personal banking guide article both mention that a routing number is required for domestic transfers, and the account agreement references routing numbers in a separate document, without any page printing the actual digits.
Task 05Application pageArrives after scripts17 out of 100
The account opening start page, reached through a link found in the compare page's own data, returns thirteen thousand bytes that strip down to the words Citibank Online, with no input fields present.
The Compare Bank Accounts page serves a genuinely complete, plain text comparison of checking tiers, fees, and waiver conditions.
The application page
What the account opening page states to a reader that runs no scripts.
13,084Bytes delivered
15Characters of visible text
0Form fields in the first response
After scripts runWhat an applicant needs
Strengths and opportunities
What is working
- The Compare Bank Accounts page (the compare accounts page) serves a genuinely complete, plain-text comparison of checking tiers, with monthly fees, every fee-waiver condition, and multiple differentiators an agent can quote directly with no login and no script execution.
- The Consumer Deposit Account Agreement PDF is openly linked and contains a full, well-organized fee schedule appendix that extracts cleanly with pdftotext, a strong example of a PDF carrying an answer the HTML does not.
- robots.txt is open and helpful: it allows crawling of the banking section and lists dedicated sitemaps (banking-sitemap.xml, pbg-sitemap.xml) that let an agent navigate straight to real product and guide pages instead of guessing paths.
Opportunities
- Publish today's savings APY as static text on the current-interest-rates page instead of loading it through a client-side, ZIP-code-based script; the label and table structure are already there and only need the numbers attached server-side.
- Add a dedicated routing-number page or FAQ entry with the actual digits as text; right now an agent (or a customer using a text-only reader) cannot find them anywhere on the public site.
- Serve the account-opening start page with visible copy describing what is needed to apply (ID, SSN, funding source, eligibility) and real form markup, the way the compare-accounts page already renders its content in plain HTML.
- Publish an llms.txt file at the root so agent traffic has a documented, intentional entry point rather than reaching only the sitemaps by guesswork.
Access
Every page the agent requested was delivered on the first attempt. Publishing an llms.txt file would give agent traffic a documented entry point.
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