You can be copied
Anyone can send an invoice in your name, and your customer has no way to tell. When they find out, the damage is not the money. It is that they trusted you and it cost them.
How we did it
We only looked at what anyone can see.
We did not contact these businesses, log into anything, or touch a single account. Everything below comes from public information, the same information a stranger or an AI assistant would find on their own.
Who they are
145 small businesses across Canada and the United States, picked from public directories. We name none of them, and we never will. Their results are kept out of search on purpose.
What we could read
Some checks look at settings that are public for every business. Others need to read the website itself, and 38 of the 145 sites could not be read properly. Those counts are shown out of the 107 we could read, never out of 145.
One more thing worth saying out loud. Our first pass told 35 of these businesses their connection was not secure, when in fact their sites were fine and had simply turned our reader away. We found the mistake, fixed it, and ran every check again. The numbers on this page are from the corrected run.
The grades
Nobody scored an A. Nobody scored a B.
This is not a reflection on how good these businesses are at their work. Most of them are excellent at it. It is a reflection of how little of that is provable to anyone who has not met them.
- A0 of 145
- B0 of 145
- C6 of 145
- D46 of 145
- F93 of 145
What was open
The same four doors were open on almost every one.
- 145 of 145
had no way to prove that a document, an invoice, or an email really came from them. If someone sends a fake one in their name, there is nothing a customer can check.
- 145 of 145
had no way for a customer to confirm a licence, an insurance policy, or a certification without picking up the phone and asking. The proof exists. It just sits in a filing cabinet.
- 145 of 145
had not switched on the setting that stops their web address being quietly pointed somewhere else. It is free, it takes one afternoon, and almost nobody knows it exists.
- 109 of 145
could still have email sent in their name that lands in a real inbox. Thirty six had this fully locked down. The rest had part of the work done and stopped before it counted.
Being found
Their customers are asking. Something else is answering.
People no longer start with a search box. They ask an assistant, and the assistant answers from whatever it can actually read. Of the 107 sites we could read, here is what it would have found.
- 89 of 107
had nothing on their site written for the assistants that customers now ask before they call anyone.
- 66 of 107
had no way to be contacted or booked that anything other than a person could use.
- 37 of 107
never said what they actually do in a form a computer can read. A human sees a services page. A machine sees nothing.
- 24 of 107
had no list of their own pages, so parts of their site are simply never seen.
What it means
None of this is a mistake anyone made.
Every business here did what it was told to do. Get a website. Get a nice logo. Answer the phone. None of that was wrong. It just stopped being enough, quietly, over about two years, and nobody sent a letter about it.
You can be skipped
When someone asks an assistant who to call, it recommends what it can read. You never see the customer you did not get. There is no missed call to return.
Both are fixable
Every single item on this page has a fix that takes minutes, not months, and most of them are free. The hard part was never the work. It was knowing the door was open.
You already know your business is real. Now everyone else can too.
The same check we ran on these 145 businesses is free for yours. It takes about a minute and tells you exactly which doors are open, in plain words.
No spam. One email with what we find and how to fix it.