Field notes · October 2026
I checked 160 home care agency websites. 93 of them are broken.
Not badly designed. Broken — in ways that stop a family reaching the agency, or stop an AI assistant reading it at all. Almost none of the owners know.
What I was actually doing
I build AI search visibility for in-home senior care agencies. The work starts by asking ChatGPT the question an adult daughter actually types — my mother is 81, she lives alone, she's had a couple of falls, which home care agencies should I look at — and writing down which agencies get named.
To know who should have been named, I had to build a list of every independent agency in each metro. That meant opening all of their websites. I was looking for what each agency says about itself. What I kept finding instead was sites that were down, hijacked, unreadable, or impossible to contact.
So I stopped and counted properly.
The numbers
218 independent, private-pay agencies across the four metros. 33 of them have no website at all. Of the 160 that have a working site and at least one Google review, here is what came back.
The ones worth describing
Three sites had been hacked
Spam content injected into the page body and, in every case, into the meta description — the summary text Google prints under the link in search results. One domain had been taken over entirely and now served an online casino. None of the three owners had any idea; this kind of injection is usually hidden from ordinary visitors and shown only to crawlers.
One agency with over a hundred reviews has someone else's website
The best-reviewed independent agency I found anywhere in the four metros has a website that belongs to a company in a different state, with a different name, serving different counties. Every family who read those reviews and clicked through landed on a stranger.
An agency with 45 reviews has been losing every emailed enquiry
Its contact page publishes an email address on a domain that does not exist — one word different from the domain the website is on. Nobody registered it. Every message sent from that page has bounced, which means the agency never saw the enquiry and the family assumed they were ignored.
Elsewhere I found an agency whose only published email address was still the one the website builder ships as an example, and another whose click-to-call button dials a different number than the one printed beside it.
Seven agencies cannot be contacted from their own website
No phone number, no email, no address. In one case the only numbers on the page belonged to other organisations — the Area Agency on Aging, a state helpline, an independent Medicare adviser. A good instinct, published instead of their own details.
Three sites are invisible to AI assistants while looking fine to you
This is the one almost nobody checks. Two of them build their entire page with JavaScript after it loads, so a person sees a normal website and a crawler receives a blank document — no agency name, no phone, no services. The third has a single line in a configuration file telling every search engine not to read the site, left over from when it was being built.
All three rank nowhere, get cited by nothing, and look perfectly healthy to their owners.
Twenty-two sites still show the placeholder text
Latin filler where the tagline belongs. Counters reading “0 % client satisfaction” next to a paragraph claiming 99.9%. Navigation links still named “blank-1” through “blank-6”. One services page still carried the theme's demo copy about war correspondents visiting dangerous places.
Families choosing who to let into a parent's home read these pages closely. None of this is expensive to fix. Most of it is a text field somebody never filled in.
Why this matters more than it used to
An AI assistant can only recommend an agency it can read. It does not browse the way a person does — it works from what crawlers collected, and if your page returns an empty document, a security warning, or somebody else's company, you are not a weak answer. You are not an answer at all.
What makes it hard to catch is that none of it shows up in your own experience of your website. You type the address, the page loads, everything looks right. The failure is only visible from the outside.
Four checks you can run yourself in five minutes
- Open your own Google Business Profile and click your website link. Not a bookmark, not your address bar — the actual link families click. Five of the agencies I checked had a listing pointing at nothing.
- Send yourself an email at the address printed on your contact page. From a personal account, not your work one. Four agencies had an address that silently rejects everything sent to it.
- Search Google for
site:yourdomain.comand read the grey summary text. That is what Google thinks your site says. If it is placeholder text, somebody else's words, or nothing at all, that is also roughly what an AI assistant sees. - Tap the call button on your site from a phone. Check the number that comes up matches the one printed next to it. On one site it did not.
How this was done
Agencies were identified from Google Maps business data across the Omaha, Lincoln, Des Moines and Kansas City metros, then filtered to independent, private-pay, non-medical in-home care — national franchises, facilities, Medicare-certified home health and Medicaid-funded providers were all excluded.
Every remaining site with at least one Google review was fetched directly and classified by outcome: unreachable, certificate failure, HTTP error, empty response, crawler-blocked, or loading normally. Sites that loaded were then read for contact details, template residue, injected content and copyright dates. Nothing here is an estimate and nothing is extrapolated — it is a count of what 160 fetches returned on one day.
Every agency named in this research has been told privately what was found on their site, at no charge and with nothing attached.
No agency is named on this page, and the details above are deliberately generalised so that none can be identified. Telling an owner their site is compromised is worth doing. Publishing it is not.
Want to know what yours returns?
I'll run the same checks on your agency, plus the part this page is really about — the three agencies an assistant names when a family in your city asks for in-home care, and what those three say that you don't. One page, no charge, no obligation to talk to me afterwards.
Book a Visibility Review