Web design in Leitrim, with the homework done.

• Checked October 2026. The searches ran on 14 October 2026 at about 3pm Irish time; ChatGPT was asked on 14 October 2026.
• The 18 businesses are the first local businesses in the Google Maps list for each of five trade searches, up to four a trade. The searches ran on a phone, logged out, from Carrick-on-Shannon town centre. Chains, wrong trades, duplicate listings and businesses outside the county were removed first. Some lists had fewer than four left, so the 18 are four plumbers, two electricians, four cafes, four hairdressers and four physio and physical therapy clinics. "The rest of the list" is everyone else in the same cleaned lists: 15 businesses.
• A website counts only if it is the business's own. A Facebook or Instagram page alone does not.
• A website linked from the Google profile counts as live even when its host shows our checks a bot check or refuses our requests. We cannot read those sites, so they are left out of every page check: "of 4 read" means the 4 sites we could read. Google's PageSpeed test can still reach them, so the speed figures ("of 5 scored") cover every site it scored.
• Speed is Google's PageSpeed test, run as a phone, three runs per site, median taken. The load time is the same test's Largest Contentful Paint: when the biggest image or block of text appears.
• Google ads come from Google's Ads Transparency Center, looked up by the business's own web address, plus one look at each search. So the ads figure counts only businesses with a web address of their own, including sites that no longer work. Facebook ads were not checked.
• ChatGPT was asked "Who is a good [trade] in [town]?" three times for each trade, from Ireland, with web search on. A business counts as named if any of the answers names it.
• "The first ten results for their own search" means the first ten ordinary results, under the map and the ads, for the business's trade-and-town search, such as "plumber carrick-on-shannon".
• Distances run from the Carrick-on-Shannon town centre point to each business's map pin.
• Figures "across the 26 towns" add up the 505 businesses Google showed first in all 26 study towns, one town per county. Every town was searched the same way on the same day, 14 October 2026.
• Anything else we could not check is left out of that count, and the count says so.
• A median is the middle value. With an even number of businesses it is the average of the two middle values.
• Searches a month are Google's own estimates (Google Ads search volume, read on 16 October 2026) for searches made by people in County Leitrim: a 12-month average, rounded by Google. Each trade's total adds up the same set of searches in every county: the trade on its own, the trade with "near me", and the trade with "carrick-on-shannon" or "leitrim" after it. Four more searches count too: "emergency plumber", "coffee near me", "coffee shop near me" and "hair salon near me".
• Singular and plural are one search in Google's data, so neither is counted twice. A search Google gives no figure for is left out, not counted as zero. One person can search more than once, and not every search for a trade comes from someone hiring, so these figures count searches, not people.
• No business from the study is named on these pages.

Sources: Google's guide to Largest Contentful Paint (good is 2.5 seconds or less); About PageSpeed Insights (90 or above is good); Google Ads Transparency Center.