Our own data · Websites

Customers ask their phone who to call. It picks from what it can read. 1 in 5 of the 257 local businesses we checked had no website to read.

So we checked how many local businesses in Napa and Solano counties can be read at all. 89 of the 257 couldn't be read by our scanner: 52 had no website, and it couldn't open 37 more. If yours is one of them, my bet is the answer your customer gets is about somebody else. Every number below traces back to our own published scans and town reports.

By Alejandro Ojeda, Napa, CA · October 23, 2026

What we checked

Between July 26 and August 15, 2026, we ran one scanner over 257 real, locally owned businesses that were open when we checked. Not chains, not directory listings. They're spread across seven towns: Napa, American Canyon, St. Helena, Calistoga and Yountville in Napa County, and Fairfield and Vacaville in Solano County.

For each business we checked whether it has a website, whether a machine can open that website, and what the site tells a machine once it's in: a structured "this is a local business" label (called LocalBusiness schema), prices a machine could quote, and a small file called llms.txt. The full method and every town report are in the public dataset.

No business is named here. We publish totals only.

The numbers, step by step

257 businesses checked.
52 had no website at all. That's 20%, about 1 in 5.
205 had a website. Our reader couldn't open 37 of them (18%).
168 sites we could actually read.
112 of those 168 had no llms.txt file (67%). That's a small extra file, and the least important thing here (more below).

Per-town counts are in each town report (click a town name in the table below); the totals add up from those. The 20% and 18% are on the aoaudit.com home page.

Town by town

Town	Businesses checked	No website	Sites we could read
Napa	40	7	26
American Canyon	28	7	20
St. Helena	35	6	22
Fairfield	43	10	31
Vacaville	48	10	33
Calistoga	37	7	22
Yountville	26	5	14
Total	257	52	168

Find your town. Send it to an owner there.

What surprised us

No town was clean. The share with no website ran from 17% in St. Helena (6 of 35) to 25% in American Canyon (7 of 28).
It clusters by trade. In Vacaville, 8 of the 10 businesses with no website were nail salons and barbershops (Vacaville report).
Prices go missing. In Calistoga, 19 of the 22 sites we could read showed no prices a machine could quote (86%) (Calistoga report).
The label goes missing. In Yountville, 12 of the 14 sites we could read had no LocalBusiness schema (86%) (Yountville report).
Nice sites can still turn the reader away. Yountville had the highest share of sites our reader couldn't open: 7 of 21 (33%). All four tasting rooms in the Yountville sample, plus a wine shop and a vineyard's coffee bar, had the same problem: a broken or incomplete security certificate setup (Yountville report). In Calistoga, all three wineries we sampled turned our reader away too (Calistoga report).

What owners are missing

My take, from reading these results:

No website. A customer asks Google or an AI app who does what you do near them. Beyond your listing, it has nothing you wrote about your prices, your services or why you're good. Odds are the answer your customer gets is about somebody else.

A website our reader couldn't open. You paid for a site. It may look fine when you open it yourself. Our reader hit a wall, and other machine readers may hit the same one. You'd never know without checking.

No prices. "How much?" is one of the first things people ask. If your site doesn't say, the answer comes from somebody else's page.

What a fix looks like

My take, in the order I'd do it:

No website? Start with one page. Your name, what you do, your town, your hours, your phone, and prices or "starting at" prices. That's enough to be read. See do I need a website.
Have a site? Find out if it opens for machines, not just for you. A free AO Audit scan uses the same scanner as this study (method). If it fails, ask whoever hosts your site to check the security certificate and whether the site blocks automated visitors.
Put your prices on the page. Even a range beats silence.
Add the LocalBusiness label. It's a short block of code that tells machines your name, address, hours and phone in a format they don't have to guess at.
llms.txt last. It's a proposed standard from 2024, not a rule anyone has to follow. It's cheap to add, and it's the least important item on this list.

What this study can't tell you

It's one scanner and one reader. A site our reader couldn't open might open for some other tool.
It's seven towns in Napa and Solano counties, not the whole country.
We didn't measure calls, visits or sales. These are signs a machine can read you, not proof you'll get more customers.
In mid-August we added businesses to three towns. The pooled share of sites without prices or the LocalBusiness label hasn't been recomputed since, so for those two I only quote town numbers.

Is your business one of the 52, or one of the 37?

The scan is free and you don't need to talk to anyone.

See if your site can be read

No website yet? Write me at alejandro@ojedaworks.com. It comes straight to me, Alejandro, in Napa.