What the Digital Trust Index measures
A score out of 100 for how easily a business can be found and reached online. It is not a safety rating, and it has nothing to do with whether a contractor is licensed or insured — that is what the nine checks are for.
Why it exists
A homeowner searching for a roofer after a storm finds whoever is easiest to find. That is rarely the best contractor — it is the one with a website a search engine can read. The Digital Trust Index measures that gap, so a good business can see it and close it.
What we measure
Four things, each checked by fetching the business’s homepage once. We never ask a business for this; we look at what is publicly there.
A live website — 35 points
The site loads and responds. A business with no website at all scores zero overall, and the card says so: not as a judgement, but because a family searching online will not find them.
Structured data — 30 points
Machine-readable markup (schema.org) that tells Google and AI assistants who the business is, what it does and where. Without it, a search engine is guessing, and an AI assistant asked “who should I call in Kenner” has nothing to name.
A way to get in touch online — 25 points
Online booking, a chat widget, or call handling. Anything that lets someone reach the business without picking up the phone at 9pm.
Analytics — 10 points
Something measuring what the site does. A site nobody measures is a site nobody maintains.
What we deliberately do not measure
Several things were considered and rejected, because a signal detected wrongly is worse than one not measured at all:
- Whether a licence number is printed on the site. We verify the licence with the issuing state board directly. Scoring a business for also printing it would be weaker than the check, and would penalise a verified contractor for a design choice.
- Whether insurance is mentioned. Same reason — we confirm it with the carrier.
- Contact forms. Most are added by JavaScript after the page loads, so they cannot be detected reliably. We measured this: of sites with a contact page, only about a quarter had a form we could see.
- Photos of completed work. Nothing in a page distinguishes a real job photo from a stock image.
- How old the domain is. It used to count for 20 points. It was removed because it is the one thing a business cannot change — a good contractor on a new domain was capped at 80 no matter what they did.
Why a score can be blank
A blank score is not a zero. It means we could not check: the website did not respond when we looked, or it asked automated visitors not to read it. We do not guess, and we never score a business on a check we did not complete.
A zero only ever appears when we did check and found nothing — no website at all, or a social media page being used in place of one.
Is a Facebook page a website?
For this score, no. A social page cannot be found the way a website can, carries no structured data, and belongs to the platform rather than to the business. A site built on Wix, Squarespace or GoDaddy is a website — it is the business’s own content on their own page, and it scores normally.
How to improve it
Every one of the four is something a business can fix, in roughly this order: get a real website, make it machine-readable, give people a way to book or message, and measure it.
You can do all of that yourself. If you would rather not, TrustLight Growth builds and runs it — the site, the search and AI visibility, booking and chat, and a voice agent for the calls you miss. $297 a month, no build fee.
See what TrustLight Growth covers →
See what missed calls are costing youEvery call that rings out is a job somebody else takes. Move a few sliders and see the number for your trade.