Original research from our database of over a million US small business websites, plus the real decisions behind how Stackra is built. Every finding gets stress-tested, and we show our work instead of hiding it in a footnote.
We pulled the receipts on two 'submit your startup' directories: who they link to, what kind of link it actually is, whether the listed sites are even real, and what happens to members after they join. No surveys. No self-reported growth. Public crawl data, checked twice.
Every number in your Stackra report compares you to real businesses. That only helps if the comparison is honest. So we treat our own data the way a good auditor treats a set of books: guilty until the numbers reconcile. Here is how we keep our benchmarks trustworthy, and why the fixes we built under pressure turned out to be textbook methods.
The backlink number every tool puts front and center is a count. We spent a year proving that count lies, and built a 0-100 score for what actually matters: who links to you, not how many, and whether any of it brings visitors.
A common assumption is that a custom-coded website is faster than a template from a site builder. We checked Core Web Vitals across 1.1 million US business websites and found the opposite is often true. The no-code builders like Wix and Squarespace pass Google's speed check more often than hand-built sites do. The reason is not the tools. It is how the page is built to load.
Every backlink tool hands you a number, referring domains, a domain authority score, some two-digit verdict, and invites you to feel good or bad about it. On its own it means almost nothing. Across 1.1 million US business sites, that number is set mostly by your industry: a typical SaaS company has around 80 referring domains, a typical real estate agent around 4. Read against another industry, a platform average, or a competitor in a different line of work, your number is noise. Read against businesses like you, it finally says something.
We measured real-world site speed across 1.1 million US business websites and grouped it by industry. The spread is 17 points. Simple local and consumer sites like restaurants and recreation are the fastest. Content-heavy media sites and business-to-business sites are the slowest. Here is the full ranking, and why the pattern shows up.
Three years of Common Crawl webgraphs (7.9 billion link edges), every domain in our 1.1M-site US corpus, four separate metrics. The pattern is consistent: link authority is draining out of local business categories toward digital-native ones, and for every site that climbed meaningfully, ten declined. What business category you're in turns out to predict your trajectory, right down to the subcategory.
Everyone selling SEO says the same thing: get more links pointing to your site and more visitors will follow. We checked three years of data on whether that is actually true, across more than five million websites. Links and visitors do go together. But which one causes the other turned out to be the opposite of what the pitch promises.
A lot of SEO advice tells you to add special tags to your website's code. We looked at 1.1 million small business websites and found those tags barely made a difference. The thing that actually lined up with a stronger website in every industry we checked: whether the business used a tool to keep track of and follow up with its customers.
The shape of the US business web, measured. Real business sites broken down into 25 categories and 469 subcategories. Retail and restaurants are more than a quarter of it, SaaS barely registers, and the whole thing skews local and physical. Here is the full breakdown, how a site earns a US label, and how we checked the labels before trusting them.
Most small business owners think real keyword research means paying $99 to $200 every month for an SEO tool. It does not. We built our entire keyword list, all 4,842 of them, for under $20 total using a pay-as-you-go tool. In the 18 days after, the number of searches we show up for on Google jumped from 7 to 27. Here is the proof, then the exact steps you can copy.
AI tools like ChatGPT could not actually read our pages, so we were invisible to them. The usual fix is to rebuild your whole site on a different setup, which takes weeks. We found a much smaller fix instead. Here is the story, the numbers, and how to decide what is right for your own site.
From the founder
Dispatches from a founder driving a car while it's being built. No polish, no content calendar. Just what's actually working.
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