Purcell VenturesResearch
Research on small business websites
Measured checks of small business websites, with the method, the limits and the aggregate data for download.
Purcell Ventures studies how small business websites work in practice: whether the home page loads, whether it tells search engines and AI assistants what the business is, and whether it lets AI crawlers read it. Each study answers a question an owner can act on, and each one publishes its full method, its limits and a data file anyone can reuse. The first study covers Alabama, where Purcell Ventures is based, and checks several of the signals the free AI visibility check reads for a single site. The second sets every listed Tuscaloosa business site beside the statewide sample, and the third runs the same checks on every listed small business site in Cobb County, Georgia.
Which studies can I read?
Which cities have their own results?
The Alabama and Tennessee city pages set local figures beside the Alabama statewide sample. The Georgia pages give the city's site count and the Cobb County figures.
How do the studies work?
Every study starts from public data. The Alabama study drew its business listings from OpenStreetMap through the public Overpass API, kept 2,102 unique business domains after dropping chains, government offices, schools and nonprofits, and drew its statewide sample at random with a fixed seed, so anyone can repeat the draw. The Cobb County study used the same query and filters and checked all 1,672 business domains in the county, so it needed no draw.
The method goes up with the results. The study page prints the Overpass query, the exact test behind each check, the time window of the run and a list of limits, such as one try per site and the gaps in volunteer map data.
The pages report aggregate figures only. No study names a business, lists a domain or ranks one company against another. The aggregate figures and the CSV carry a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license, so you can quote and reuse them with credit to Purcell Ventures and, for listing data, OpenStreetMap contributors.
To see where your own site stands on the same checks, run the free AI visibility check. It reads your robots.txt, llms.txt and home page and lists what to fix.
Reporters quoting a study can find bios, a headshot and the press contact in the press kit.
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