99 of 1,371 local business sites fail every technical check
Technical SEO is usually written about as a spectrum — a score to nudge upward, a list to work through. Across 1371 South West businesses it is not a spectrum at all. It is two groups.
The shape is the finding
Section titled “The shape is the finding”| Technical score | Businesses |
|---|---|
| 0 | 99 |
| 1–24 | 21 |
| 25–49 | 75 |
| 50–74 | 152 |
| 75–99 | 606 |
| 100 | 418 |
418 of 1371 businesses score a perfect 100. 99 score zero. The median is 88, and the middle is comparatively thin.
That matters because it changes what the advice should be. A spectrum invites incremental work — shave a bit here, improve a bit there. Two groups invite a different question: which one are you in, and what is the single thing that moves you?
Why sites cluster at the ends
Section titled “Why sites cluster at the ends”The checks behind this pillar are not judgement calls. Is the site reachable and indexable? Does it declare structured data? Are canonical signals coherent? Is there duplicate content confusing the crawl?
Those things are mostly decided once, by whoever built the site, and then never revisited. A modern platform configured competently passes all of them by default. A site built cheaply, or migrated badly, or half-finished, fails several at once — because the same neglect causes all of them.
So the 99 businesses at zero are rarely failing because someone made a subtle mistake. They are failing because nobody has looked. That is genuinely good news: it is the cheapest category of problem in this entire index to fix, and the only one where a single afternoon can move a score from the bottom group to the top.
What to check, in order
Section titled “What to check, in order”Ranked by how often it is the actual cause, not by how interesting it is.
1. Can search engines reach the site at all? A robots.txt blocking more than intended, a noindex left on after a rebuild, or a staging site still live. This single cause accounts for more zero scores than everything else combined, and it is invisible from the front end — your site looks perfect to you.
2. Does the site say what it is? Structured data — LocalBusiness at minimum, with your real address, hours and phone. It is the most direct way to tell both a search engine and an answer engine what your business is, which is why it feeds the AI search presence pillar as well as this one.
3. Is there one canonical version of each page? http and https, www and bare, trailing slash and not, print versions, parameter-laden URLs. Every duplicate splits whatever authority the page has earned.
4. Is the sitemap honest? A sitemap listing pages that 404, redirect, or are blocked teaches crawlers to trust it less. Fewer accurate URLs beat more optimistic ones.
Detail on each is in the knowledge base: technical SEO, indexing and crawling, schema markup and duplicate content.
The part worth being honest about
Section titled “The part worth being honest about”Technical is 20% of the Digital Visibility Score, and it is the pillar where local businesses already do best — median 88, against a median of near zero for AI search presence. Fixing technical moves you out of the bottom group; it does not move you to the top of your sector, because most of your competitors already pass it.
Treat it as a floor to clear rather than an advantage to build. If you are at zero it is urgent and cheap. If you are at 100, the work is somewhere else entirely.
How this was measured
Section titled “How this was measured”Each check runs once per business per quarter against the live site, and a check that cannot be evaluated is excluded rather than counted as a failure. Scores are published per business in the open datasets; the methodology states the rules and the changelog records every change to them.
Data: PYC Local Digital Visibility Index, 1371 businesses across the South West, recomputed at build time. Analysis by PYC.