Roughly what will it cost?

A1. The research question

When a homeowner wants a new garden, a patio, a pool or someone to look after the lawn, and looks up an independent company online, usually on a phone, can they find out what it does, whether it works in their area, what its work looks like, roughly what it costs, whether they can ask for a quote without calling, whether it is licensed and insured, whether it can look after the yard every season and whether neighbours vouch for it?

Population. Independently owned US landscaping and outdoor-living companies with one to three locations and their own website, in four groups: landscape design and build, lawn care and maintenance, hardscape and outdoor living, and pools and irrigation. These are the outdoor 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.

A3. How the sites were read

Pages. The home page, then for each of nine topics (services, service area, gallery or portfolio, prices, maintenance plans, about, reviews, estimate or quote, 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

8 questions homeowners ask before they ask for a quote, 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.

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 business, and the homeowner questions above do not feed it. It is a weighted mean of five pillars:

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 business 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 189 sites, a share reported for the whole sample is precise to within ±7.1 percentage points at 95% confidence (worst case, a 50% share; 1.96 × √(0.25/n)). By type: landscape design and build ±14.1 (n = 48); lawn care and maintenance ±14 (n = 49); hardscape and outdoor living ±14.1 (n = 48); pools and irrigation ±14.8 (n = 44). 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 business before scanning, and every home page was checked for gambling, pharmacy, adult and crypto spam
• Businesses were checked for duplicates across domains by phone number
• Detection rules were checked against the evidence they record for a sample of passes and fails for every rule, and revised before the final run
• 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. Landscaping is seasonal, and the scan ran in October, when some companies promote fall cleanups, snow removal or winterisation rather than spring work.
• Only public pages were read: the home page and pages it links to. Chat widgets, multi-step quote forms, design tools and customer portals were not tested.
• Answers are read from the page as a server delivers it. Content that only appears after scripts run in the browser (some whole sites, galleries and review widgets) is not seen, which the study counts as a gap a search engine or a slow phone would also meet.
• The study reports what a website shows. It does not judge any company's design, planting, workmanship or prices, and it does not check whether any licence, certification or insurance is valid or current.
• 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 businesses, not a random draw. Margins of error are given as a guide to precision, not as a guarantee that the results hold for every business 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.