Seven sectors with enough businesses in the sample to report on. Where they differ, and where they don't.
Back to the headline findings MethodologyThe no-website rate across these seven sectors runs from 24.0% to 36.4% — a spread narrow enough that the confidence intervals overlap. On the evidence here, knowing a Richmond business's sector tells you very little about whether it has a website.
Where sector does separate them is reputation and machine readability. Community & Nonprofit are 57.8 points more likely than Personal Care & Beauty to have fewer than ten Google reviews, and that difference is far too large to be noise.
under 10 reviews · n=50 · ±11.6
under 10 reviews · n=83 · ±10.1
under 10 reviews · n=62 · ±11.6
under 10 reviews · n=51 · ±13.2
Sectors are ordered by the share with fewer than ten reviews. The no-website column carries its 95% interval; treat small differences between adjacent sectors as noise rather than ranking.
| Sector | n | No website | ± | No schema | No llms.txt | <10 reviews |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Community & Nonprofit | 50 | 24.0% | ±11.5 | 45.9% | 67.6% | 76.0% |
| Professional Services | 83 | 27.7% | ±9.5 | 40.0% | 75.0% | 65.1% |
| Health & Medical | 62 | 29.0% | ±11.0 | 31.8% | 88.6% | 62.9% |
| Home & Construction | 51 | 33.3% | ±12.5 | 44.1% | 76.5% | 49.0% |
| Real Estate & Property | 31 | 25.8% | ±14.8 | 34.8% | 73.9% | 48.4% |
| Retail | 40 | 27.5% | ±13.3 | 32.1% | 53.6% | 40.0% |
| Personal Care & Beauty | 33 | 36.4% | ±15.6 | 21.1% | 63.2% | 18.2% |
Schema and llms.txt columns are measured against businesses with a live, non-social website, so their denominators are smaller than n.
Below the 30-business reporting threshold: Auto & Transport (n=20), Food & Hospitality (n=15). A further 189 confirmed businesses carry a Google category that holds no sector meaning — "Services", "Building", "Point of interest" — and were left unclassified rather than forced into a bucket.
This is a consequence of drawing the sample at random from the business registry: it produces an honest cross-section of the metro, but it spreads thin once you cut it by trade. Reporting on individual trades rather than sectors needs a sample drawn per trade, which is a different study.
Across seven sectors the no-website rate runs from 24.0% to 36.4%, and the 95% confidence intervals overlap, so no sector can be reliably ranked as worst on that measure from this sample. Sector differences are much clearer on review counts and AI readiness.
Community & Nonprofit lead, with 76.0% having fewer than ten Google reviews, against 18.2% for Personal Care & Beauty. That gap is wide enough to be a real difference rather than sampling noise.
Health & Medical: 88.6% of their live websites have no llms.txt file, compared with 53.6% for Retail.