Original Research
Original research on search, AI answers, local listings, ads and websites, with the data source, method and sample size behind every number.
The first website ChatGPT cites in an answer is the same website Google ranks #1 for that question 20.2% of the time, so four times out of five ChatGPT leads with a different source. Agreement runs from 69.4% on software questions down to 0.5% on recipe questions.
87.7% of the pages ChatGPT cites in its answers are not in Google's top 10 results for the same question. Even counting whole websites, 66.2% of the websites ChatGPT cites have no page on Google's first page, and in 41.9% of ChatGPT answers not one cited website appears there.
57.6% of Google searches for products and services now open with an AI Overview, the AI-written answer Google places above the regular results. On phones the rate is higher: 61.2% against 55.4% on a computer for the same keywords.
On 40.2% of Google searches made on a phone, the first regular website listing starts below the bottom of the screen, so the searcher has to scroll before seeing a single website. Map listings, not AI Overviews, do most of the pushing.
Ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity the same "what is the best..." question and all three name the same brand first on 25.5% of questions. Three times in four, at least one AI assistant puts a different brand at the top, and no two assistants agree even half the time.
Google's own AI assistant, Gemini, leads its answer with the website Google Search ranks #1 for the same question in 9.5% of answers, so nine times in ten Google's two products point to different sources. ChatGPT matches Google's #1 result twice as often, at 20.2%.
66.7% of website homepages fail at least one of the basic SEO checks in Google's free Lighthouse test, and even the 1,000 most visited sites fail 61% of the time. The most common failure is also one of the easiest to fix: a missing meta description.
30.8% of website homepages have no meta description, the short summary Google can show under a link in search results. Among the 1,000 most visited websites the rate is 15.1%, half as often, and the drop appears only at the very top of the web.
32.7% of website homepages with images have at least one image with no alt text, the written description that screen readers read aloud and search engines use to understand a picture. Across the web, 11.1% of homepage images have no alt text at all, and another 27.6% have an empty one.
18.3% of the canonical tags on the homepages of the 500,000 most visited websites point Google to a different URL, telling it that another page is the main version of the homepage. 7.1% point to a different website altogether, and 46.7% of these homepages have no canonical tag at all.
Only 50.9% of the homepages of the 10,000 most visited websites carry schema markup, the code that tells search engines and AI systems what a page is about, against 55.7% across all websites. And the types that describe a business in detail are rare: LocalBusiness markup appears on 5.2% of homepages.
23.5% of the homepage title tags of the 500,000 most visited websites run past 60 characters, the point where Google usually cuts a title off. At the other extreme, 38.3% are under 30 characters, too short to say much more than a brand name.
47.1% of US local businesses have fewer than 10 Google reviews, and one in five has none at all. The median business has 12 reviews, so a steady trickle of honest reviews is enough to stand out in most categories.
The business Google ranks first on Google Maps has a median of 101 Google reviews, against 39 at position 20, and the three businesses in Google's map pack have a median of 79 against 47 for the rest of the top 20. Map pack businesses also post more photos and link a website more often, while their star ratings barely differ.
31% of US Google Business Profiles have no website link, so a customer who finds the business on Google cannot check its services, prices or booking page. Those businesses trail on almost everything else too: a median of 2 Google reviews, against 27 for businesses that link a site.
74% of local business websites have no local business schema, the code that tells Google in a fixed format what a business is, where it is and when it is open. Only 9% give search engines their opening hours this way.
81.7% of US local businesses with fewer than 10 Google reviews have not replied to any of them, against 20.5% of businesses with 200 or more, and 53% of all local businesses leave their 20 newest reviews unanswered. The businesses that do reply are quick about it: 3.9 days on average, and 86.1% of replies arrive within a week.
Local businesses reply to 30.4% of their one- and two-star Google reviews, so seven in ten complaints sit on the profile with no answer. Five-star reviews get a reply 42.4% of the time: owners thank their fans and leave their critics unanswered.
68.1% of US small business websites have no contact form on their homepage or the two pages linked from it, leaving visitors to hunt for a way to get in touch. Where a form does exist, the typical one asks for 5 fields, one in six asks for 10 or more, and 42.7% of SaaS demo and contact forms ask for 7 or more.
35.4% of small business homepages show no button asking the visitor to book, call, get a quote, shop or make contact on the first screen, the part a desktop visitor sees before scrolling. 28.2% show no button of any kind.
70.4% of SaaS pricing pages offer a way to contact sales, request a quote or book a demo, including two thirds of the pages that also show prices. 16.9% of SaaS pricing pages show no price at all.
SaaS companies that state an annual-billing discount on their pricing page take 27% off on average for paying yearly, well above the roughly 17% that the common "two months free" rule of thumb implies. The median discount is 25%, across 16 pricing pages that put a number on it.
61% of SaaS pricing pages that show prices present their plans side by side with no plan marked as most popular, recommended or best value. Of the 39% that do highlight a plan, most use the exact words "Most popular."
36.3% of SaaS homepages ask visitors for neither a demo nor a free trial, the two standard ways a software company turns interest into a sales conversation or a user. And when a SaaS website does offer a free trial, 57.9% of the time it never says how long the trial lasts.
A click on a personal injury Google Ads keyword costs $195.73 on average, 116 times the $1.68 auto dealers pay and 18 times the $10.82 average across all keywords. Half of all keywords cost $4.23 or less, and at the cheap end no wedding venue keyword costs more than $4.39 a click.
The most expensive Google Ads keyword in the US, "best houston truck accident lawyers", costs $972.50 per click, 90 times the $10.82 average. All 10 of the priciest keywords are searches for injury lawyers, and 208 keywords cost $100 or more per click.
A Google Ads click in Colorado costs $13.05 on average, 24% more than the $10.49 national price for the same keywords, the highest premium of the 25 largest US states. New York is the cheapest at $9.21, 13% below the national price.
53.9% of US Google advertisers have been showing ads for a year or more, and the median advertiser has been active for 412 days; just 9.1% have an ad history shorter than 30 days. Almost all of them are checked: 98.9% of advertisers showing Google ads in the US are identity-verified, and one in eight is based outside the US.
Video accounts for 9.9% of the ads US businesses run on Google, while plain text ads still make up 70.2%. Two in three Google advertisers have no video ad at all, and the advertisers with the largest ad libraries are more than twice as likely to use video as the rest.
State Farm has 100,000 Google ads on file, the most any advertiser can display, while the typical US advertiser has 6. The 100 most active advertisers have a median of 950 ads each, more than 150 times the typical advertiser.
The 10,000 most visited websites fail Google's automated accessibility test 65.7% of the time, more often than small business websites at 60.2%. And 94.8% of all homepages fail at least one accessibility check.
On all 11 website platforms compared, most small business homepages have at least one image with no alt text, the description a screen reader reads aloud: 60.1% overall, from 52.5% on Drupal to 83.2% on Webflow, where homepages carry a median of 25.5 images.
53.9% of websites running an accessibility overlay still score below 90, the passing line on Google's automated accessibility test, against 60.7% of websites without one. Overlay sites average 3.1 points higher, and 94.2% still fail at least one accessibility check.
5.5% of websites on .us domains run an accessibility overlay, about 18 times the 0.31% rate of German .de websites and more than three times the 1.7% rate across the whole web. About 263,000 homepages run one, and four products account for most of them.
68.6% of website homepages have text too faint against its background to meet the accessibility standard for color contrast, making low contrast the most common accessibility failure on the web, more than twice as common as images with no alt text.
56.3% of forms on the 10,000 most visited websites have no label, the name that tells a screen reader what a field is for, against 44.7% of forms on small business websites. Across the web, 45% of homepage forms have no label at all.
62.4% of the companies whose websites show up most in US Google search results have a Trustpilot score below 3 stars out of 5. Delivery apps and mobile carriers sit at the bottom of seven industries, with every company below 3 stars, while companies with 10,000 or more reviews mostly escape the trend.
71.3% of the companies whose websites show up most in US Google results did not reply to any of their recent Trustpilot reviews. Across all their reviews, companies reply 20.3% of the time, and they answer 1-star complaints less than half as often as 5-star praise.
70% of news articles that rank in Google News never link to a company or commercial website, and 48.9% link to no outside website at all. The beat matters: about 45.5% of tech news stories link to a company website, against about 29% of finance stories.
Just 0.4% of links from news publishers carry the "sponsored" label Google asks sites to put on paid links, against 2.8% of links from online stores. 96.1% of news publisher links carry no label of any kind, so almost every link a brand earns from the press counts in full.
Top-ranked US hotels post a management reply under 70.2% of their recent Tripadvisor reviews, about seven times the 9.7% rate for restaurants in the same cities. Half of hotels answer 90% or more of their reviews.
When a news site mentions a brand, the mention is negative 38.5% of the time, against 26.2% on blogs, stores and other websites. Across the web, 30.7% of recent brand mentions are negative, almost as many as the 35.4% that are positive, and insurance brands follow the same pattern, with 39.2% of their news mentions negative.
72.7% of product pages on US small-business websites have no Product schema, the code that tells Google a product's name, price and availability. 4.5% mark up their ratings or reviews, and 29% have no structured data of any kind.
Amazon appears on Google's first page for 66% of US product searches but holds the top organic spot for 8.2%, about one search in twelve. It reaches the top three for 30.9%, and Google mostly ranks Amazon's listing pages, not its product pages.
Amazon appears on Google's first page for 87% of headphone shopping searches but for 4% of running shoe searches, where Nike, Adidas and On hold most of the #1 results instead. Across all product searches, marketplaces take 9.1% of page-one results, and brand and independent store websites take 43.9%, the largest share of any type of site.
44.8% of the online stores that rank on Google's first page for US product searches run on Shopify, more than four times the 10% that run on WordPress, including WooCommerce. Half of Shopify stores' page-one listings sit in the top three results.
29.6% of Google Shopping listings show a sale price, and in home goods the share rises to 42.8%. The median markdown is 25%, and how often a listing shows a discount depends far more on the seller than on the product.
For 40.5% of products sold by two or more sellers on Google Shopping, the most expensive seller charges at least 25% more than the cheapest. The typical product costs 16% more at its priciest seller, and the gap widens as more sellers list it.
97.6% of established business websites have links from other websites pointing at pages that now return an error, and on a quarter of them more than 22.6% of all incoming links lead to a dead page. 39.4% of small business websites have the same problem.
37.1% of small business websites that run on secure HTTPS still link to at least one old, insecure http:// address, and 23.5% of their pages carry such a link. Church websites have the highest rate at 63%.
382,097 websites, 2.5% of all homepages, still load Universal Analytics, the old version of Google Analytics that stopped recording data in July 2023. Among the 500,000 most visited homepages, 6.6% carry the old tag with no sign of its replacement.
659,120 homepages served over secure HTTPS, 4.5% of them, still pull in at least one image, script or other file over insecure HTTP. Websites outside the 10 million most visited do it at more than twice the rate of the 10,000 most visited.
41% of the top websites that switched platforms between September 2025 and March 2026 moved to Shopify, a net gain of 717 websites. No other platform gained more than 41. Self-managed systems such as WooCommerce, WordPress and Magento saw more websites leave than arrive.
Magento lost 23.8% of its stores between October 2024 and September 2026, falling from 58,906 homepages to 44,868. Over the same two years Shopify grew 22.7%, and of the top Magento stores that switched platforms, most went to Shopify.
44.5% of WordPress sites that show their version are not on the current 7.1 release, and 29.9% are more than one major release behind. The most visited WordPress sites are behind the latest release almost as often, at 41.4%.
61.6% of websites do not send HSTS, the one-line setting that tells browsers to always use a secure connection. Even among the 10,000 most popular sites, 48.7% skip it.
48.1% of websites that publish their PHP version run PHP 8.1 or older, releases that no longer receive security fixes. That is more than a million homepages, and a third of them are still on PHP 7 or PHP 5.
About 28% of websites, more than 4.3 million homepages, load a version of a common JavaScript library with a publicly documented security flaw. Old copies of jQuery account for the most websites, on 3,428,748 homepages.
83% of PrestaShop websites that show their jQuery version run one older than 3.5.0, the release that fixed two published security flaws, against 36.1% of all websites that show a version. Self-hosted store platforms lag the web, and so do the most visited websites: 44.3% of the top 10,000 that use jQuery run a flawed version.
58% of websites outside the 10 million most visited, the long tail where most small businesses sit, have no web application firewall or similar security layer in front of them. Among the 10,000 most visited websites, 34.4% have none.
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