We Audited 54 Santa Fe Business Websites. Here Is What the Scan Found.

We scanned 54 Santa Fe 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 10-kilometer radius of the Santa Fe city center that publish a website, dropped national chains and aggregators, deduplicated the domains, and scanned the surviving homepages. Sixty candidates, 54 complete audits. This is a purposive sample, not a census of Santa Fe and not a random one. Every percentage counts hard failures only.

Santa Fe posted the highest median of any New Mexico city we scanned: 76 out of 100. Thirty-one of the 54 landed at 75 or better, which is DeepAudit's good tier.

Two things keep that from being a victory lap. The mean was 70.5, well under the median, because a handful of sites scored very badly and dragged it down. And across all 54 sites, exactly one earned an A-. None earned an A.

The higher score tells us these sites passed more of the scanner's checks. It does not tell us they are better designed, that they rank, or that they turn visitors into customers. We did not measure any of that, and a technical score is not a design score.

The highest-scoring city had the worst focus-indicator rate

Forty-four of the 54 pages failed the visible-focus check. That is 81.5 percent, the highest rate of any city in the project, and it happened in the city with the best overall scores.

Fifty-three of the 54 pages triggered at least one accessibility failure. The category averaged 50 out of 100.

A visible focus indicator is what tells someone tabbing through a page which link, button, or field will respond next. Remove it, or style it so it disappears into the design, and a person navigating without a mouse loses their place.

That is the real finding here, and it is more interesting than any citywide median: a page can pass most technical checks and still contain a serious barrier for a particular person. The score and the experience are different things.

To be precise about what this is. It is a focus-indicator rule, not a keyboard test and not a screen-reader test. A real keyboard test asks whether every control can be reached and operated, whether the focus order makes sense, and whether focus ever gets trapped in a modal. The automated finding tells you where manual testing starts. Put your mouse down and tab through your own site. You will learn more in two minutes than the score will tell you.

llms.txt was absent on 35, and that is not an AI-visibility score

Thirty-five of the 54 sites had no llms.txt file.

That is file presence and nothing more. It does not mean the AI assistants planning someone's trip are unaware the business exists. Those systems draw on crawlable page content, search indexes, maps, reviews, directories, and press coverage, none of which require this file. llms.txt is a proposed convention, not an established protocol, and our later research found most of these files are generated automatically by a platform or plugin rather than written on purpose.

We did not ask a single AI assistant to plan a trip to Santa Fe. So this post cannot tell you which businesses it would name.

The rest of the findings, kept separate

• Low Open PageRank: 35 of 54. That is a third-party proxy built from an open web-link graph, not Google's PageRank and not a ranking score. Check it against real backlinks, local citations, press mentions, and gallery or venue relationships before anyone sells you a link campaign.
• Primary heading failed: 29 of 54. 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.
• Under 300 words: 27 of 54. A prompt to read the page, not proof it cannot rank. A gallery homepage may need very little text if the work, the location, the hours, and the next step are already clear.
• HTML validation errors: 25 of 54. This count needs severity, and we have not classified it yet. An obsolete attribute is not the same as malformed markup that closes the <head> early and stops your metadata from being read. Google does not hand out rankings for passing a validator. Fix the errors that break something.

What this sample tells us, and what it does not

Santa Fe's sampled sites scored better than the rest of the state's, and still failed one basic accessibility check at the highest rate we recorded anywhere.

Correcting these findings makes a site clearer, more accessible, and technically sounder. It does not prove the business will rank, get named by an AI assistant, or convert a traveler who was already going to spend money. We collected no ranking, review, booking, or revenue data, and it would be dishonest to imply otherwise.

For the businesses here that depend on someone researching a trip before they arrive, the website is worth inspecting well beyond its score. This scan did not measure that customer journey. It just tells you where to start looking.

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 it flags focus visibility, navigate your own page with the keyboard. When it calls a page thin, read the page. When it reports invalid HTML, find out which error it is and whether it actually matters.

The score is a summary. The work starts underneath it.

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.