Research
Independent studies on how small business websites actually perform in production. Open datasets, reproducible methodology, no consultant gloss.
We checked 368 small business sites the way Google renders them and the way non-rendering AI crawlers fetch them. 1 in 4 hide an answer-critical element from AI.
By Joshua R. Gutierrez, Crystal A. Gutierrez
What 292 audits revealed about mobile performance, accessibility, and the technical foundations of organic reach.
By Joshua R. Gutierrez, Crystal A. Gutierrez
Most SEO advice is recycled opinion. We would rather measure. Axion Deep Digital runs primary research on how small business websites actually behave in production, at scale, using the same DeepAudit AI engine we run for clients: a real browser SEO audit that renders every page the way Google and AI crawlers do, not a shortcut that reads raw HTML.
The findings are not academic. They change how we build and rank sites. Our 292-site study found that 96.9% of small business sites fail Core Web Vitals on mobile. Our AI visibility study found that 1 in 4 hide an answer-critical element from non-rendering AI crawlers like GPTBot and ClaudeBot. Both problems are invisible to most audit tools and both cost real traffic.
Every study ships with an open dataset and a reproducible methodology so anyone can check our work. If you want to see where your own site stands against the patterns we measure, run it through the same audit framework below.
Run your own website through the same audit framework we use for our research. Free, no signup, results in about 60 seconds.
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