The Headline: Two-Thirds of Contractor Sites Are Invisible to Machine Readers
We audited 179 contractor and home-services websites across the Portland metro in August 2026, measuring only things we could verify programmatically: schema markup, basic on-page elements, HTTPS, mobile readiness, and platform. The single biggest finding: 65.9% of the sites we could analyze, 116 out of 176, have no LocalBusiness structured data anywhere on their homepage. Only 34.1% tell search engines and AI assistants, in the machine-readable format they prefer, what the business is, where it is, and what it does.
That gap matters more in 2026 than ever. Google uses LocalBusiness schema to populate map results and knowledge panels, and AI search tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity lean on structured data when deciding which businesses to name in an answer. A contractor without it is asking algorithms to guess, and algorithms guess wrong or move on. The good news is just as real: 98.3% of the sites were reachable and 93.8% served valid HTTPS, so the fixes below are measured in hours, not rebuilds.
Methodology: What We Measured, How, and When
The sample comes from a real prospecting dataset of Clackamas County businesses, centered on Oregon City, Milwaukie, West Linn, Gladstone, Happy Valley, Lake Oswego, and the surrounding Portland-metro communities, plus a handful of Portland, Tigard, and Tualatin addresses. From the businesses categorized as contractors or home-services trades, we took a stratified sample of 179 companies, each with its own website: 44 plumbers, 43 HVAC contractors, 31 roofing contractors, 28 general contractors, 16 pest control services, 10 electricians, and a handful of lawn care, water damage restoration, and septic companies.
Data was collected in August 2026 with an automated fetcher that visited each homepage exactly once over HTTPS, falling back to plain HTTP if the secure connection failed. It identified itself with an honest user agent, ran four requests at a time, and gave up after ten seconds. For every page it recorded verifiable technical facts: reachability, valid HTTPS, redirects to a different domain, and whether the HTML contained a mobile viewport meta tag, a title, a meta description, an H1 heading, and JSON-LD structured data, including LocalBusiness or a trade subtype like RoofingContractor. It also fingerprinted each site's platform from HTML signatures.
The limitations are worth stating plainly. This is a homepage-only snapshot: a site with schema only on its contact page counts as missing it. We ran no performance lab testing, so nothing here measures speed or Core Web Vitals. Platform fingerprints come from HTML signatures, which is why 30.1% of sites land in the unknown bucket. Three sites, 1.7% of the sample, did not respond at all, so every percentage about page content is computed against the 176 sites we could analyze. The raw per-domain records and the aggregated summary are saved in our repository, because a study you cannot check is just an opinion.
Finding 1: The Schema Gap Is the Big One
Structured data is how a website introduces itself to machines. Of the 176 homepages we analyzed, 62, or 35.2%, contain no JSON-LD structured data of any kind. Not an incomplete implementation: none at all. Another slice has JSON-LD blocks filled with generic WebPage or Organization markup rather than business-type data. Altogether, 116 sites, 65.9% of the analyzed sample, have no LocalBusiness schema or any trade-specific subtype on their homepage.
Only 60 sites, 34.1%, pass that bar. In practical terms, when an AI assistant is asked for a roofer in Happy Valley or a homeowner asks Google who repipes houses in Milwaukie, two out of three local contractors are relying on the algorithm to piece together their identity from unstructured text. Their competitors who publish clean schema are handing the algorithm a filled-out form instead. We wrote about why this compounds in our piece on getting recommended by ChatGPT, and the audit numbers show how rare the advantage still is.
Finding 2: Basic On-Page Elements Are Missing More Often Than You'd Expect
These are the elements every site builder can produce, and every SEO guide since 2008 has covered. They are still missing at meaningful rates. One in four analyzed homepages, 44 sites or 25%, has no meta description, so Google writes its own snippet from whatever text it finds, often a navigation menu or a cookie notice. Thirty sites, 17%, have no H1 heading at all, leaving the single most important on-page relevance signal empty.
Fourteen sites, 8%, serve a homepage with no mobile viewport meta tag, which tells the browser to render the desktop layout shrunk to a phone screen. In a metro where most homeowners search for a contractor from a phone, often standing in front of the problem they need fixed, that is a self-inflicted wound. Even the humble title tag is missing on 3 of the 176 analyzed sites, 1.7%. Each miss is small on its own, but we saw plenty of stacking, and stacked gaps describe a page that is harder to rank, harder to click, and harder to use than it needs to be.
Finding 3: Half the Market Runs on WordPress
Platform fingerprints show how contractor sites actually get built. WordPress powers 89 of the analyzed homepages, 50.6% of the sample, more than every other identifiable platform combined. GoDaddy's site builder accounts for 14 sites, 8%, followed by Squarespace at 8 sites or 4.5%, Wix at 5 sites or 2.8%, Weebly at 3 sites or 1.7%, and Webflow and Next.js at 2 sites each, 1.1% apiece. The remaining 53 sites, 30.1%, show no recognizable signature: custom builds, older hand-coded sites, and platforms our fingerprinting could not identify.
No platform is inherently a problem, and none guarantees good practice; we found WordPress sites with immaculate schema and builder sites with none, and the reverse. What the distribution does explain is the median homepage weight: 166,354 bytes of HTML before a single image, stylesheet, or script loads. Page-builder themes bury content under layers of wrapper markup, and that bloat is a performance tax the owner pays every month.
Finding 4: The Plumbing of the Web Is Mostly Fine
Honest research includes the boring findings, and the boring findings here are good news. Of 179 sites, 176 responded, a 98.3% reachability rate. Of those, 165, or 93.8%, served their homepage over valid HTTPS, a near-total reversal from where local business sites sat a decade ago. Only 7 sites, 4%, redirected to a completely different domain, the pattern you see when a company rebrands or lets an old domain forward to a franchise page.
The three unreachable sites are their own cautionary tale: a domain that no longer resolves is a business whose reviews and inbound links all point at a dead address. If you take one action from this study, confirm your domain is set to auto-renew. It is the cheapest insurance in this entire dataset.
What This Means If You Own a Contracting Business
The competitive picture is unusually favorable for anyone willing to do basic work. When 65.9% of your local competitors have no LocalBusiness schema, adding it moves you into the top third of the market on a signal that Google and AI search engines actively reward. When a quarter of competitors let Google improvise their search snippet, writing a real meta description is a free click-through advantage. None of this requires outspending anyone. It requires doing the unglamorous fundamentals most of the market has skipped.
There is also a warning here for anyone shopping for a new website. The gaps we measured are not edge cases; they are defaults. A site can look polished and still ship with no schema, no meta descriptions, and no H1s, because those are invisible in a design mockup. Before you sign for a redesign, ask what structured data ships with the build and check the delivered site with a validator. If the answer is vague, you are likely buying the same 65.9% problem with a fresh coat of paint.
How to Fix It, In Order of Impact
Start with structured data, because that is where the market-wide gap is widest. A complete LocalBusiness graph with your trade-specific type, service area, hours, and contact details is a one-time implementation that pays off in every search and AI surface that reads it. Our technical SEO and schema service builds exactly that, and our guide to schema markup for local business shows what the finished markup should contain if you want to check your own site first.
Then close the on-page gaps the audit measured: a unique title and meta description on every page, exactly one descriptive H1, and a viewport meta tag so the site renders properly on phones. If your platform fights you on any of this, the platform itself may be the constraint. Our website design work rebuilds contractor sites on a modern stack where these fundamentals are defaults rather than plugins.
If you want to know where your own site lands against this dataset before spending anything, our free visibility audit checks your schema, on-page elements, and local search presence against your actual competitors and shows you the gaps in plain language. The findings are yours to keep.