Field survey · Sydney · August 2026
We checked 185 small business websites around Sydney. Not one passed all twelve tests.
Forty of them had nothing outright broken. None of them came through clean. The most common problem was not what we expected, and the most expensive one is fixed in an afternoon.
Method
What we actually did
We built a checker that loads a website's home page and looks at twelve things Google and the AI assistants use to work out what a business does and whether to put it in front of someone. It takes about ten seconds per site. It is the same tool anyone can run on their own site, free, at the bottom of this page.
We pointed it at 225 independent small business websites across Sydney, from Penrith to Cronulla to the Northern Beaches, covering 40 different trades and services across 44 suburbs and regions. We deliberately left out national chains, franchises and directory listings. Every site belongs to a single business that someone runs.
Of those 225, twenty two blocked our request outright and eighteen could not be reached at all. A site that blocks an automated request is not a broken site, it is a site with a firewall doing its job, so we scored neither group and left them out. That leaves 185 sites with a full result, and everything below is drawn from those.
Each check returns one of three things. A pass means there is nothing to do. A warning means it works but it is costing you something. A fail means it is missing or broken.
Results
The twelve checks, worst first
| Check | Share of 185 sites | Fail | Warn | Pass |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Readable by AI tools | 68% | 28% | 4% | |
| One tap contact | 12% | 48% | 40% | |
| Page weight | 0% | 54% | 46% | |
| Main heading | 15% | 20% | 65% | |
| Meta description | 11% | 23% | 66% | |
| Page title | 0% | 37% | 63% | |
| Image alt text | 0% | 37% | 63% | |
| Structured data | 15% | 0% | 85% | |
| Location named on the page | 2% | 0% | 98% | |
| The page loads | 2% | 0% | 98% | |
| Mobile ready | 1% | 0% | 99% | |
| Secure connection | 0% | 0% | 100% |
Findings
Four things worth knowing
or a tap to email
The phone number you have to type out
Only 74 of the 185 sites let a customer both tap the phone number and tap the email address. Another 89 had one but not the other, and 22 had neither, which means every enquiry starts with someone copying a number off a screen.
This is the finding we would act on first. It is not a search ranking issue, it is a lost job issue, and on most sites it is a change to two lines of code.
they need to be
Half a megabyte before a single photo loads
The middle of the pack sent 209KB of raw HTML before any image, font or script was counted. One site sent 4.3MB. Ten sites were over a megabyte on the HTML alone.
On a phone on a suburban connection that is the difference between a page that appears and a page someone gives up on.
problem
Google cannot tell what the page is about
Twenty eight sites had no main heading at all. Another 37 had more than one, and one site had fourteen. The main heading is the single strongest signal a page gives about its own subject, and a third of Sydney is either not sending it or sending it over and over.
Fifteen percent also had no structured data of any kind, so search engines and AI assistants are left guessing whether the business is a plumber, a shop or a blog.
simply broken
Three businesses have a website that is not there
Three of the 185 home pages returned a server error at the moment we checked. Not slow, not ugly. A 404 or a 500, which is exactly what a customer would have seen too.
Nobody is going to tell these businesses. There is no alert for this. Somebody has to look.
By trade
Where the problems cluster
Average number of outright failures per site, for every trade where we checked at least five businesses. Small samples, so read this as a hint rather than a verdict.
Advice
If you only do three things
Make the phone number and the email tappable
Not written out as text. An actual link, so a thumb on a phone starts the call. Sixty percent of the sites we checked get this wrong in one direction or the other, which makes it the cheapest advantage available to a small business in Sydney right now.
Give every page one main heading that says what it is
One heading, at the top, in plain words a customer would use. Not your slogan. If the page is about emergency plumbing in Penrith, the heading says emergency plumbing in Penrith. A third of the sites we checked either skip this or repeat it until it means nothing.
Add structured data so machines know what you are
A small block of code that states plainly that you are a business, what you do, where you are and how to reach you. Fifteen percent of the sites we checked have none, which leaves search engines and AI assistants inferring it from the words on the page and getting it wrong.
Limits
What this survey does not tell you
It is one page per business. We checked the home page, not the whole site, so a business with a superb services page and a thin home page scores worse here than it deserves.
It is a snapshot. Every result was taken in a single week in August 2026. Sites change.
The worst performing check needs a caveat. Readable by AI tools looks for an llms.txt file and for question and answer markup, and 68 percent of sites have neither. That number sounds alarming and mostly is not. llms.txt is a very new convention that almost nobody has adopted yet, so what this really measures is how early it still is. We are reporting it because we measured it, not because we think two thirds of Sydney is in trouble.
The sample is not random. We found these businesses through ordinary searches, the way a customer would, which biases the set toward businesses that already turn up in search results. If anything that means the real picture across all of Sydney is worse than this, not better.
And three sites were returning server errors when we checked, so their other eleven results describe an error page rather than a website. We left them in the count and flagged them separately rather than quietly dropping them.
Our own score
We ran it on ourselves first
It would be a poor look to publish this without putting our own site through the same twelve checks. Here is what elsio.com.au came back with.
The warning is image alt text, and the reason is that our home page has no images on it at all. That is a deliberate decision about load speed, and the check is being blunt rather than wrong. We are leaving it flagged rather than gaming the score.
Your turn
Run the same twelve checks on your own site.
Check my site Free, about ten secondsThe Sydney Website Survey was conducted in August 2026 across 225 independent Sydney businesses, 185 of which returned a complete result. Figures are rounded to the nearest whole percent. We run this survey quarterly. If you are writing about it and want the underlying data, email hello@elsio.com.au.