What We Found Auditing 53 Small Business Websites in Houston

We ran 53 Houston small business websites through DeepAudit. Houston is a different animal from the New Mexico markets, roughly 219,000 small businesses, real competition, and energy, medical, and B2B money behind a lot of the sites. It showed: the highest average score we measured anywhere, a median of 75, with a couple of sites even cracking 90.

A higher bar is not the same as a closed door, though. The same gaps were everywhere.

83 percent fail the keyboard test

Focus indicators failed on 83 percent of Houston sites, the highest rate in our entire study. Accessibility failed on all 53 and averaged 50 out of 100. More polished sites, same blind spot. Houston also leans heavily on WordPress with stacked plugins, which is part of why these sites can look fine and still fail the technical and accessibility checks running underneath.

Three quarters are invisible to AI

75.5 percent of Houston sites were missing llms.txt, the highest rate in our whole set. In a market this size, being the business in your category that AI assistants can actually describe is a real edge, and right now almost nobody has claimed it.

Better basics, still leaking

Houston beat the smaller markets on fundamentals and still left money on the table: H1 problems on 49.1 percent, missing JSON-LD schema on 37.7 percent, thin content on 52.8 percent, missing HSTS on 45.3 percent, and low domain authority on 62.3 percent. Good enough to look professional, not tight enough to win.

What it means for a Houston business

Houston is competitive enough that you cannot coast and uneven enough that the technical and accessibility layer is wide open. The sites that win here over the next year are not the prettiest. They are the ones that fix accessibility, get AI-ready, and tighten the Core Web Vitals that WordPress plugin stacks quietly wreck. In a 219,000-business market, the bar is simply "better than the plugin-bloated site next door," and that is very reachable.

Run the free audit on your own site. No signup, no credit card, and the report is yours to keep. Or book a free 15-minute teardown and we will walk through your top three fixes live, no pitch.