We Audited 53 Houston Business Websites. Here Is What the Scan Found.

We scanned 53 Houston business websites with DeepAudit, the browser-based auditor we built and use on client work.

Where they came from: we queried the OpenStreetMap Overpass API for businesses within a 25-kilometer radius of the Houston city center that publish a website, dropped national chains and aggregators, deduplicated the domains, and scanned the surviving homepages. Sixty candidates, 53 complete audits.

This is a purposive sample, not a census of Houston and not a random one. Every percentage counts hard failures only.

Houston produced the highest median of any city we scanned: 75 out of 100. Two of the 53 scored above 90. The mean was 71.9, which is the more conservative number and the one worth remembering.

That is the headline, and it comes with an immediate qualifier. Every audited page still triggered an accessibility failure, more than half fell below the content threshold, and the structured-data and security findings did not disappear just because the median went up.

Houston scored higher, and we cannot tell you why

The scan does not explain the cause. A larger economy, a different industry mix, more agency involvement, a different platform distribution, and simply which 53 businesses happened to be in the sample could all contribute. We measured the outcome, not the mechanism.

What we can say is narrower: these sites passed more of the scanner's checks overall, while several specific categories kept failing anyway.

Visible keyboard focus was missing on 44 of 53 pages

That is the highest focus-indicator failure rate in the whole project, and it happened in the city with the best scores.

A visible focus state is what tells a sighted keyboard user which link, button, or field will respond next. Remove it, or make it indistinguishable from the design, and the page gets much harder to operate.

All 53 pages triggered at least one accessibility failure, and the category averaged exactly 50 out of 100.

This is a focus-indicator check, not a keyboard test. A real keyboard test also asks whether every control can be reached and operated, whether the focus order makes sense, and whether focus ever gets trapped. The automated finding tells you where manual testing should start, and nothing more.

We did not isolate what caused these failures. The usual suspects are removed browser outlines, low-contrast custom focus styles, and interactive components nobody ever tabbed through. We are not going to blame a CMS for it, because we did not measure that.

llms.txt was absent on 40, and that is not an AI-visibility score

Forty of the 53 sites had no llms.txt file, the highest absence rate in the set.

That is file presence and nothing more. llms.txt is a proposed convention, not an established protocol, and there is no documented guarantee that ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity consult it when recommending a business. Our later research found most of these files are emitted automatically by a platform or plugin rather than written deliberately.

We did not ask a single AI assistant to recommend a Houston contractor. So this post cannot tell you who they name.

The rest of the findings, kept separate

They do not mean the same thing, so they should not be one line in a paragraph.

• Content threshold: 28 of 53 pages under 300 words. A prompt to read the page, not proof it cannot rank. A short page can do its job. A long one can still say nothing.
• No JSON-LD structured data: 20 of 53. Organization or LocalBusiness markup makes the business details explicit rather than inferred. It should match the visible page and the Google Business Profile, and it does not guarantee rankings.
• Primary heading failed: 26 of 53. Our rule fails a page for having no H1 or more than one, and multiple H1s are not automatically a defect, so this count is stricter than it should be. We are fixing the rule.
• No HSTS header: 24 of 53. A browser-security finding. It belongs in the security section, not next to the SEO checks.
• Low Open PageRank: 33 of 53. That is a third-party proxy, not Google's PageRank and not a ranking score. Check it against real backlinks and referring domains before anyone sells you a link campaign.

A citywide score is not a local-search strategy

This is the part that matters most in Houston, and it is where the smaller-city framing breaks down.

Houston is not one local market. A downtown energy consultancy, a Katy dental office, a Pearland caterer, and a contractor in The Woodlands are not competing in the same result. Google's local results turn mainly on relevance, distance, and prominence, which means the real comparison is query by query and neighborhood by neighborhood.

A citywide median is descriptive. It is not strategic. It cannot tell an individual business who it actually competes with.

It also cuts against the easy conclusion. If Houston's sampled sites scored better, the honest reading is that competitors here may be more capable, not that the market is easier. Basic cleanup is probably less differentiating in Houston than in a smaller market, not more.

What this sample tells us, and what it does not

These sites scored better than the smaller-city samples and still showed repeated accessibility, content, structured-data, and security findings. Fixing those produces a clearer, safer, more usable website.

What the scan does not establish: which businesses rank, who an AI assistant names, which sites will win over the next year, or that the bar is "better than the site next door." We collected no ranking, Business Profile, review, backlink, proximity, or lead data. A higher score raises the standard for the analysis. It does not remove the work.

Check your own site

Run the free audit on your own site. No signup, no credit card, and the report is yours to keep.

Then verify it. When the report calls a page thin, read the page. When it flags focus visibility, put your mouse down and tab through the site yourself. When it finds no structured data, compare your visible business details against your Google Business Profile before writing any markup.

The scanner shows you where to investigate. It cannot tell you who wins Houston.

If you would rather we read it with you, book a free 15-minute teardown and we will walk through what it found, live, no pitch.