Report · Our own data · 2026

The State of Local Business Visibility: Napa & Solano 2026

A customer looks you up. Past your listing, is there anything you wrote: your prices, your services, why they should pick you? We checked 257 local businesses in seven towns. For 89 of them (35%), our scanner found nothing it could read: 52 had no website, and it couldn't open 37 more.

By Alejandro Ojeda, Napa, CA · Published October 23, 2026 · Scans run July 26 to August 15, 2026 · Download the PDF

5 things owners are missing

1. 1 in 5 had no website at all.

52 of 257 (20%)

No website of their own: past a listing, there's no page the owner runs with their prices, services and hours. It happened in every town, from 17% in St. Helena (6 of 35) to 25% in American Canyon (7 of 28).
2. Some businesses have a website our scanner couldn't open.

37 of 205 sites (18%)

The site may look fine in your own browser. Our scanner still hit a wall. Add the businesses with no website and our scanner found nothing to read for 89 of 257 businesses (35%).
3. Most sites don't say what things cost.

60% to 86% of the sites we could read, by town

In every town, most readable sites showed no prices a machine could quote. Lowest: American Canyon, 12 of 20. Highest: Calistoga, 19 of 22.
4. Most sites never say "I'm a local business" in a way machines read.

62% to 86% of the sites we could read, by town

That label is called LocalBusiness schema: a short block of code with your name, address, hours and phone. Lowest gap: Napa, 16 of 26 without it. Widest: Yountville, 12 of 14.
5. Wine country sites turned our scanner away the most.

7 of 21 Yountville sites (33%), the highest rate of the seven towns

All four tasting rooms in the Yountville sample, plus a wine shop and a vineyard's coffee bar, had a broken or incomplete security certificate setup. In Calistoga, all three wineries we sampled turned our scanner away too.

Sources: the seven town reports and the dataset page on aoaudit.com, linked in the table below. Every number here is copied from those pages or added up from them.

Town by town

Find your town. Click its name for the full report.

Town	County	Businesses checked	No website	Sites our scanner couldn't open	Sites we could read	No prices shown*	No LocalBusiness label*
Napa	Napa	40	7	7 of 33	26	19 (73%)	16 (62%)
American Canyon	Napa	28	7	1 of 21	20	12 (60%)	13 (65%)
St. Helena	Napa	35	6	7 of 29	22	17 (77%)	17 (77%)
Calistoga	Napa	37	7	8 of 30	22	19 (86%)	15 (68%)
Yountville	Napa	26	5	7 of 21	14	9 (64%)	12 (86%)
Fairfield	Solano	43	10	2 of 33	31	24 (77%)	20 (65%)
Vacaville	Solano	48	10	5 of 38	33	25 (76%)	26 (79%)
Total		257	52	37 of 205	168	by town only	by town only

* Out of the sites we could read in that town. We don't give a seven-town total for these two columns because no published page states one; the town numbers are what each report says. One more check, the small llms.txt file, was missing on 112 of the 168 readable sites (67%). It's the least important item in this report.

What it means if you own a business here

My take, from reading these results. These are opinions, not findings.

No website is the biggest gap. When someone asks Google or an app who does what you do nearby, your listing is all they have. Your prices, your services and why you're good aren't written down anywhere you control. A one-page site fixes most of that.

A site our scanner couldn't open is the sneaky one. You probably paid for it. It looks fine to you. You'd never know a scanner like ours got turned away unless somebody checked. In Yountville, the town report found all four tasting rooms, a wine shop and a vineyard's coffee bar had a broken or incomplete security certificate. That's usually a job for whoever hosts the site, not a rebuild.

Missing prices cost you the "how much?" question. It's one of the first things people ask. If your page doesn't answer it, someone else's page will.

Order I'd fix things in: get a website, make sure automated tools can open it, put prices on it, add the LocalBusiness label, then llms.txt last. llms.txt is a proposed standard, not a rule anyone has to follow.

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

Method

Who: 257 real, locally owned businesses that were open when we checked. No chains, no directory listings. Seven towns: Napa, American Canyon, St. Helena, Calistoga and Yountville in Napa County; Fairfield and Vacaville in Solano County.
When: July 26 to August 15, 2026. In mid-August we added businesses in three categories the first lists under-covered (lawyers, eye care, home and senior care) to Napa, Fairfield and Vacaville. Each town report lists its own scan dates.
How: one automated scanner, the same one behind the free scan at aoaudit.com. For each business: is there a website, can the scanner open it, and does it show a LocalBusiness label, prices a machine could quote, an llms.txt file and a meta description.
What we publish: totals only. No business is named in this report.
Who we are: Ojeda Works runs The AO Audit, which published the town reports and sells fixes for the problems they describe. Weigh the numbers knowing that. The counts, the method and the license are all public so you can check them.

Limits

One scanner. A site our scanner couldn't open may open for other tools, including search engines.
A point in time. These are summer 2026 results. Some sites may have changed since.
A sample, not a census. 257 businesses in seven towns, not every business in either county.
We didn't ask any AI assistant about these businesses. This report says nothing about what ChatGPT, Google or any other tool actually answers. It only measures what our scanner could open and read.
No sales data. We didn't measure calls, visits or sales. These are signs a machine can read a business, not proof of more customers.

Full method, every town report and the data license (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0) are on the dataset page.

How to cite this report

Reporters, chambers and schools are welcome to use these numbers. Please cite it like this:

Ojeda, Alejandro. "The State of Local Business Visibility: Napa & Solano 2026." Ojeda Works, October 23, 2026. https://ojedaworks.com/napa-solano-business-visibility-report-2026.html. Data: The AO Audit, Napa Valley AI-Visibility Dataset, scans July 26 to August 15, 2026 (CC BY 4.0).

Please keep the wording "our scanner couldn't open" for the 37 sites. It means our tool couldn't get in, not that nobody can.

Questions or a quote: alejandro@ojedaworks.com. English or Spanish.

Take it with you

The same numbers, method and limits on 3 pages.

Download the PDF report

Want to know if our scanner can open your site? The free scan uses the same scanner as this report.

The State of Local Business Visibility: Napa & Solano 2026

5 things owners are missing

1. 1 in 5 had no website at all.

2. Some businesses have a website our scanner couldn't open.

3. Most sites don't say what things cost.

4. Most sites never say "I'm a local business" in a way machines read.

5. Wine country sites turned our scanner away the most.