How we measured

Where the data comes from

Store locations come from the public dealer locators of the manufacturers in the research. Dealer websites are the sites those locators link to, limited to US dealers. A dealer group with several addresses for one website is counted once.

How a website was read

Each website was read in one of three ways, and every chart says how many of each it includes:

• Full review: our page reader read the site directly.
• Estimated: the site turned our reader away or answered slowly, so the result is built from an archive sample, the sitemap and Google's own homepage test. Some pages could not be read.
• Outside test only: only Google's homepage test was available. These sites get no grade and are left out of the grade charts.

Sites with no public evidence at all are left out of every chart.

The six areas

Each website is measured in six areas. The labels on this site use plain words; the name in brackets is the area's name in the source data, and the number is its weight out of the whole.

• Found on Google (Technical SEO, 25): titles, descriptions, headings, canonical tags, sitemaps, pages search engines may index.
• Equipment listings (Inventory pages, 25): one page per machine, with photos, a stock number and product data search engines can read.
• Parts on your site (Parts pages, 20): a parts page a customer can find, part-number pages, a request form or a cart.
• Store hours and locations (Local presence, 10): a page per store with hours and directions, and store details as structured data.
• Helpful pages and specs (Content, 5): enough words on each page to answer a customer's question.
• Speed on a phone (Speed, 15): Google's own mobile speed test of the homepage. Lab and field speed figures, llms.txt and AI-crawler settings were measured too but are not charted.

Grade bands

The weighted areas give an overall score out of 100 and a grade: A from 80, B from 65, C from 50, D from 35, F below that. The map colours each store by its website's grade band. Its popup and the website rankings below the map show each graded website's dealer name, website, grade, score, the six area scores and its rank among the graded US websites, overall and among the websites of each manufacturer whose brands the dealer carries. An estimated result is marked as estimated. The findings charts stay totals across many dealers. The map counts only websites linked to a store location, so its totals are smaller than the Findings page's.

The snapshot for your own website

The lookup gives a dealership its own snapshot: for a graded website its grade, score, the six area scores and its rank (the same as on the map), then what is working, up to three next steps and, for each area, whether the site is ahead of most dealers in its region, in line with the region, or has room to grow. A site without a grade is told why. The snapshot data is published as encrypted files, one entry per website, that can only be read by typing that website's address. Nothing is sent to us when you use the lookup.

Groups and charts

A group (a region, a store-size class, a manufacturer or a platform) appears on its own only when at least the minimum number of graded websites belong to it; smaller groups are summed as Other. A dealer carrying several lines counts under each of its manufacturers.

Re-checks and removal

Websites change. To ask for a re-check after a fix, or to have a dealership's website or store removed from the benchmark, email hello@wagglepath.com with the website address. Removed sites leave the lookup, the map, the rankings and the store list at the next refresh.