Families decide before you knock

A1. The research question

When a homeowner finds pests, or wants their home protected, and looks an independent pest control company up online, usually on a phone, can they find out whether it treats their problem, whether it can come soon, whether they can book an inspection without calling, whether it serves their town, what it costs, what happens if the pests come back, who is licensed to treat their home, whether the treatment is safe for their children and pets, and whether their neighbours vouch for it?

Population. Independently owned US pest control companies with one to three locations in one state and their own website, in four groups: general household pest control, termite and wood-destroying insects, wildlife and rodent removal, and mosquito, bed bug and specialty services. These are the pest control 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, pests treated, prices and plans, guarantee, about, reviews, service area, booking, 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 homeowners ask before they let a technician into the house, 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 company, 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 company 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 155 sites, a share reported for the whole sample is precise to within ±7.9 percentage points at 95% confidence (worst case, a 50% share; 1.96 × √(0.25/n)). By type: general household pest ±14.6 (n = 45); termite and wood-destroying insects ±16.3 (n = 36); wildlife and rodent removal ±15.7 (n = 39); mosquito, bed bug and specialty ±16.6 (n = 35). 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 company before scanning, and every home page was checked for unrelated spam content
• Detection rules were checked against the evidence they record for a sample of companies in every group, 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.
• Only public pages were read: the home page and pages it links to. Chat widgets, quote calculators and multi-step booking forms 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 schedulers, review widgets and service-area maps) is not seen, which the study counts as a gap a search engine or a slow phone would also meet.
• 13 candidates blocked or did not answer automated visitors and are not in the study; sites behind such protection may differ from those studied.
• The study reports what a website shows. It does not judge any treatment, product, price or safety claim, or compliance with any state pesticide licensing or labelling 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 companies, not a random draw. Margins of error are given as a guide to precision, not as a guarantee that the results hold for every company 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.