Method
What we measured, and what we refuse to say.
The Index answers one question: where does this business sit among businesses like it? Everything below is in service of that answer holding up when an agency puts it in front of a client.
What is scanned
Businesses are drawn from 568 US cities across 16 industries and measured directly. We run the scans ourselves rather than licensing a dataset, which is why the coverage is uneven: a business with no website has no page speed to measure, and its Google profile is the only signal there is.
| Measure held | Businesses | Share | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google profile, rating and review count | 45,353 | 86.4% | The only signal a business without a website has |
| Website found and reachable | 35,029 | 66.7% | Everything below is a subset of this |
| Page content crawled | 34,807 | 66.3% | What the site actually says |
| Page speed measured | 29,974 | 57.1% | Scanned by us, not licensed |
| Domain authority measured | 26,515 | 50.5% | Whether anyone links to them |
| No website at all | 17,486 | 33.3% | No domain they control could be found |
Each row is a subset of the one above it, except the Google profile, which exists for businesses with and without a website.
How a business is placed
A business is compared only against its own industry at its own city size, never against a national figure. The reference point then moves with the business: below the median average it is measured against that average, above it against the top quartile, and in the top quartile against the best-ranked business in its own city.
That is deliberate. A business already beating the median average learns nothing from being told so, and the thing it actually competes with is the business down the road.
When we withhold a comparison
An industry and city-size cell holding fewer than 30 measured businesses cannot carry a percentile claim, so we do not make one. The report says the comparison was withheld and why.
The same rule applies at the other end. A business that leads its own city on every measure is told there is no material gap, rather than handed a manufactured one. An analyzer that always finds a problem is an analyzer nobody should trust.
We publish aggregates only. A named business never appears alongside its score on a public page. Scans can also be wrong: a site can be down at the moment we measure it, and a business can be listed under the wrong industry. Send a figure that looks wrong to hello@storefrontindex.com and we re-scan it.