Clients shop for an agentbefore the storm

A1. The research question

When someone shopping for cover, or a policyholder after a loss, looks an independent insurance agency up online, usually on a phone, can they find out how to reach it and when it is open, what it can insure, which insurance companies it represents, whether they can start a quote online, how to file a claim, who their agent would be and whether that agent is licensed, whether they can pay a bill or change a policy without calling, and whether other clients vouch for it?

Population. Independently owned US insurance agencies with one to three offices and their own website, representing more than one insurance company, in four groups: personal lines (home and auto), commercial and business, life, health and Medicare, and specialty (farm and crop, marine, flood and coastal). These are the insurance businesses a small or mid-size web agency can realistically win as clients.

A2. Who was studied

The sample was built from local search listings, city by city, then screened so that every site in it is one an independent agency could realistically win.

Source	What it contributes	Sites
Local search, personal lines	Independent agencies selling home, auto, renters and umbrella cover, found through web search town by town and the city pages of a carrier's public agent locator (Progressive), which list independent agents with their own websites	31
Local search, commercial	Independent agencies selling business, contractor, workers' compensation and commercial auto cover, found through web search town by town and the same agent locator	22
Local search, life, health and Medicare	Independent life, health and Medicare brokers and agencies found through web search and a local-business directory's health insurance city pages (Expertise.com)	44
Local search, specialty	Independent agencies specialising in farm, ranch and crop, boat and marine, aviation, trucking, equine, or coastal wind and flood cover, found through web search and the same agent locator	18

From list to sample	Sites
Candidates listed	178
Removed at screening: no response, refused automated visitors, or parked (0; candidates were checked against the research crawler while the list was built)	0
Removed at editorial review: an agency with an outside platform investor, an agency with four offices, a national aviation broker, and a domain that did not match the listed agency (4)	−4
Cohort	174

Region (US Census)	Personal lines	Commercial and business	Life, health and Medicare	Specialty: farm, marine and flood	All
Northeast	14	10	10	8	42
Midwest	14	10	10	6	40
South	14	11	11	9	45
West	15	12	10	6	43
All regions	57	43	41	29	170

A3. How the sites were read

Pages. The home page, then for each of nine topics (products, carriers, quote, claims, team, about, client service, reviews, contact) the best-matching link on the home page.

Speed and accessibility. Google PageSpeed Insights (Lighthouse) on a mid-range phone profile and on desktop, plus Chrome UX Report data from real visitors over the previous 28 days where Google publishes it for the site.

Crawler conduct. One request at a time to each site, at least 400 ms apart, at most ten pages per site; robots.txt is read and obeyed for every page requested; a site that refuses is left out and never retried. The crawler identifies itself as Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; ClikitiResearch/1.0; +https://clikiti.com).

A4. What was measured

9 questions people shopping for cover, and policyholders after a loss, ask before they call, answered from what each site publishes, and 4 technical checks against published standards. A check passes only when the rule below is met; anything the crawler cannot confirm counts as not answered.

Question	Counts as answered when	Standard
How do I reach you, and when are you open?Tappable phone plus office hours	The home page has a tappable phone link, and the home, contact or about page states office hours (a day and a time range).	Clikiti client question 1 of 9
What can you insure?Three or more lines of cover named	Three or more lines of cover are named on the home, products or about page (for example home, auto, umbrella, business, workers' compensation, life, Medicare Supplement, Medicare Advantage, flood, boat, farm).	Clikiti client question 2 of 9
Which companies do you quote?Three or more insurance companies named in text	Three or more insurance companies the agency represents are named in the page text. Names that appear only inside logo images or their alt text do not count.	Clikiti client question 3 of 9
Can I start a quote online?A quote can be started online	A link, button, form or embedded rater lets the visitor start a quote, request a quote or compare plans online.	Clikiti client question 4 of 9
What do I do when I need to claim?How to file a claim, with a number or link	The site says how to file or report a claim and gives a way to do it: a phone number beside the instruction, a link to a carrier's claims page, or a claims page that lists numbers.	Clikiti client question 5 of 9
Who would my agent be?An agent named with their role	At least one person at the agency is named with an insurance role (agent, producer, account manager, principal or a professional designation such as CIC or CISR).	Clikiti client question 6 of 9
Are you licensed where I live?Licence number, NPN or licensed states shown	The site shows an insurance licence number, a National Producer Number, or the states in which the agency is licensed.	Clikiti client question 7 of 9
Can I pay or change my policy without calling?Pay a bill or request a change online	A client can pay a bill, request a policy change, ID cards or a certificate of insurance online, through the agency's own client portal or links to the carriers' service pages.	Clikiti client question 8 of 9
Do other clients vouch for you?Reviews marked up, in a widget or quoted	Client reviews are marked up for search engines (Review or AggregateRating structured data), shown through a review widget, or at least two client testimonials are quoted.	Clikiti client question 9 of 9
Technical checks
Loads in under 2.5 s on a phoneLoads in under 2.5 s on a phone	Real visitors on phones see the main content within 2.5 seconds (Chrome UX Report, 75th percentile). Where Google publishes no visitor data, the phone lab test is used.	Core Web Vitals · LCP
Text contrast passes 4.5:1Text contrast passes 4.5:1	No text on the home page fails the WCAG 1.4.3 minimum contrast of 4.5:1, in either the phone or desktop test.	WCAG 1.4.3
Images have text descriptionsImages have text descriptions	Every meaningful image on the home page has a text description (WCAG 1.1.1).	WCAG 1.1.1
InsuranceAgency structured dataInsuranceAgency structured data	The site describes the agency to search engines with InsuranceAgency structured data.	Schema.org · InsuranceAgency

A5. The website score

Each site's overall score (0 to 100) is Clikiti's website score, rubric 2.0.0. It measures the website, not the agency, and the client questions above do not feed it. It is a weighted mean of five pillars:

Pillar	Weight	Based on
Usability	30%	Checks of the home page for broken links and images, and an expert review of the page as rendered on a phone and on a desktop screen, against Jakob Nielsen's ten usability heuristics. Each issue must name the heuristic, a severity on the Nielsen Norman Group scale and the exact element or wording; issues without all three are discarded, and two independent passes must agree.
Speed	25%	Google Lighthouse on a mid-range phone (60%) and on desktop (20%), and real-visitor Core Web Vitals from the Chrome UX Report (20%) where available.
Accessibility	25%	Google Lighthouse accessibility audits (70%) and Clikiti's own WCAG checks of the served page (30%).
Search	10%	Google Lighthouse SEO audits (60%) and Clikiti's own search checks of the served page (40%).
Trust	10%	Google Lighthouse best-practice audits (40%) and security header checks (60%).

Within a pillar, each issue costs points by severity (critical, high, medium, low) and by how many times it occurs; issues based on judgement count at 70% of measured ones, and duplicates of the same root cause count once. On the four agency profiles, the number out of 100 is this overall score, and each dot is one check in its group: filled when the site passes it, hollow when it does not.

A6. Precision

With 170 sites, a share reported for the whole sample is precise to within ±7.5 percentage points at 95% confidence (worst case, a 50% share; 1.96 × √(0.25/n)). By type: personal lines ±13 (n = 57); commercial and business ±14.9 (n = 43); life, health and medicare ±15.3 (n = 41); specialty: farm, marine and flood ±18.2 (n = 29). Differences between types smaller than these margins should be read as similar. Percentages are rounded to whole numbers; medians are the middle value of the sites in a group.

A7. Quality control

• Every home page in the cohort was fetched and its title checked against the listed agency before scanning, and every home page was checked for unrelated spam content (gambling, pharmacy, adult, crypto)
• Ownership statements in site footers were checked for broker roll-ups before scanning
• Detection rules were checked against the evidence they record for a sample of agencies in every group, and revised before the final run
• The agency-website vendor behind each site, where its markup names one, is recorded so that template boilerplate can be told apart from an agency's own answers
• Every published figure is recomputed from the data at build time, and a statement in the text that the data does not support stops the build
• Results are published only after automated checks for missing data, anonymity, accessibility of the report itself and the margin of error statement pass

A8. Limitations

• A point-in-time snapshot: sites change, and a site may have improved or declined since it was read.
• Only public pages were read: the home page and pages it links to. Quote forms were not submitted, client portals were not logged into and comparative raters were not run.
• Answers are read from the page as a server delivers it. Content that only appears after scripts run in the browser (some quote widgets, review widgets and carrier lists) is not seen, which the study counts as a gap a search engine or a slow phone would also meet.
• Many agency sites are built on a small number of agency-website platforms that supply standard pages; an answer that comes from such a template counts the same as one the agency wrote.
• The study reports what a website shows. It does not judge any agency's advice, any policy's cover or any premium, or compliance with any state insurance licensing or advertising rule.
• Automated accessibility tests find only part of what WCAG covers; keyboard and screen-reader use need a manual audit.
• The sample is a structured list of real, independent agencies, not a random draw. Margins of error are given as a guide to precision, not as a guarantee that the results hold for every agency in the country.

A9. Data, licence and corrections

The aggregate results are published as CSV and JSON beside this report under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence: you may reuse, adapt and share them, including in client proposals, with a credit to Clikiti and a link. No per-site results are published. Corrections and removal requests are reviewed and answered personally; see the end of this report.