The Cross-Industry Quality Report Card: 16 Sectors Ranked Across 1 Million Websites
Every published quality benchmark uses the same approach: pick 20-30 famous websites, score them, and generalize. Our own EEAT by Industry post analyzed 30 sites. Our Readability by Industry covered 27. These curated samples reveal individual site performance, but they can't answer the aggregate question: when you look at an entire industry's web presence — tens of thousands of sites — which sectors actually produce the highest-quality websites?
We ranked 16 industries across four quality dimensions — SEO, EEAT, WCAG accessibility, and readability — using aggregate data from LLMSE's database of 1.5 million classified URLs. The sectors range from 10,550 domains (Real Estate) to 325,121 (Business & Industry). Every grade is from LLMSE's automated analysis pipeline, not a curated sample.
The results reveal that every industry has a blind spot — and the sectors you'd expect to lead don't always win.
The Scorecard
Pass rates by sector, ranked by total domain count. SEO pass = A+B+C grades. EEAT pass = A+B+C. WCAG pass = A+B+C. Readability pass = A+B (content at 8th-grade level or below).
| Sector | Domains | SEO | EEAT | WCAG | Readability |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Business & Industry | 325,121 | 2.4% | 60.9% | 51.8% | 30.8% |
| Computer & Electronics | 218,275 | 1.3% | 29.0% | 65.3% | 37.5% |
| Entertainment | 170,326 | 0.6% | 60.0% | 52.4% | 32.3% |
| Marketing & Advertising | 52,578 | 2.2% | 54.7% | 55.4% | 39.7% |
| Health | 40,985 | 2.9% | 70.0% | 54.4% | 24.0% |
| News & Media | 39,815 | 1.6% | 53.6% | 43.9% | 35.7% |
| Automotive | 37,324 | 1.5% | 59.3% | 43.8% | 35.6% |
| Shopping | 29,625 | 1.6% | 56.0% | 48.9% | 53.2% |
| Food & Drink | 27,203 | 3.3% | 56.4% | 46.7% | 46.2% |
| Beauty & Fitness | 25,743 | 2.4% | 64.1% | 47.1% | 43.5% |
| Home & Garden | 21,581 | 2.3% | 48.7% | 53.8% | 41.8% |
| Travel | 17,430 | 2.6% | 49.2% | 45.3% | 36.0% |
| Sports | 17,100 | 3.6% | 57.2% | 42.6% | 47.9% |
| Law & Government | 13,451 | 3.5% | 58.2% | 56.7% | 19.2% |
| Finance | 12,847 | 3.5% | 53.9% | 54.0% | 34.8% |
| Real Estate | 10,550 | 1.5% | 65.6% | 40.1% | 32.1% |
| Web average | 1.5M | 1.9% | 48.4% | 52.6% | 35.3% |
The Superlatives
| Metric | Best Sector | Rate | Worst Sector | Rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SEO | Sports | 3.6% | Entertainment | 0.6% |
| EEAT | Health | 70.0% | Computer & Electronics | 29.0% |
| WCAG | Computer & Electronics | 65.3% | Real Estate | 40.1% |
| Readability | Shopping | 53.2% | Law & Government | 19.2% |
Every winner and loser tells a story. Let's unpack them.
SEO: Sports Wins, Entertainment Collapses
Sports websites pass SEO at 3.6% — nearly double the web average of 1.9%. Sports media competes for high-value search traffic: game results, player stats, betting odds, and live scores. This search-dependent business model incentivizes SEO investment.
Entertainment is at 0.6% — the worst SEO of any sector, one-third the web average. Entertainment sites (streaming platforms, fan pages, media portals) rely on direct navigation and app engagement rather than search discovery. When your audience types "Netflix" directly into the address bar, SEO optimization is an afterthought.
Finance (3.5%) and Law & Government (3.5%) also rank near the top — regulated industries where search visibility translates directly to revenue or public access.
EEAT: Health Leads, Technology Trails
Health websites have the highest EEAT pass rate at 70.0% — far ahead of second-place Real Estate (65.6%) and 1.4x the web average. Healthcare content faces intense scrutiny from Google's YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) standards. The industry has responded: author credentials, medical review disclaimers, institutional backing, and citation patterns that score strongly on trust signals.
Computer & Electronics sites have the worst EEAT at 29.0% — 40% below the web average. Technology content is often written by anonymous contributors, posted without author attribution, and published on domains with minimal organizational identity. Developer blogs, tech forums, and open-source project pages prioritize code over credibility signals. The paradox: the people building the web's infrastructure are worst at demonstrating trustworthiness on it.
WCAG: Tech Builds Accessible Sites, Real Estate Doesn't
Computer & Electronics leads accessibility at 65.3% — the highest WCAG pass rate and 1.2x the web average. Web developers and technology companies understand semantic HTML, ARIA attributes, and heading hierarchies because they build the tools that implement them.
Real Estate is worst at 40.1%. Listing sites rely on image-heavy galleries, interactive maps, and virtual tours — content types that create accessibility challenges. Screen reader users searching for homes face a web that wasn't built for them.
The second-worst is Sports at 42.6%. Live scores, dynamic visualizations, and multimedia-heavy layouts create the same accessibility barriers.
Readability: Shopping Writes Plainly, Government Doesn't
Shopping sites lead readability at 53.2% — the only sector where a majority of content is written at an 8th-grade level or below. Product descriptions, pricing pages, and purchase flows reward clarity. Dense prose loses sales.
Law & Government is worst at 19.2% — nearly 3x worse than Shopping. Legal language, regulatory text, and bureaucratic prose make government websites the hardest to read on the entire internet. This is despite Law & Government having one of the best WCAG accessibility rates (56.7%). Government sites are technically accessible but functionally incomprehensible — the screen reader can parse the page, but the human still can't understand the content.
Health at 24.0% shares the same problem: medical terminology, clinical language, and risk disclaimers produce content that patients struggle to understand.
The Paradoxes
The most revealing patterns emerge from gaps between dimensions within the same sector:
Computer & Electronics: Best Accessibility, Worst Trust
- WCAG: 65.3% (best)
- EEAT: 29.0% (worst)
- Gap: 36.3 percentage points
The people who build the web know how to make it accessible. They just don't bother demonstrating why anyone should trust them. Technology sites lack the organizational schemas, author credentials, and editorial transparency that EEAT measures. The gap suggests that technical competence and content credibility are independent skills — and the tech sector has invested in only one.
Law & Government: Most Accessible, Least Readable
- WCAG: 56.7% (2nd best)
- Readability: 19.2% (worst)
- Gap: 37.5 percentage points
Government mandates accessibility but doesn't mandate readability. The result: websites that comply with WCAG 2.1 Level A while publishing content at a graduate-school reading level. A blind citizen can navigate a government website, but neither they nor a sighted citizen can understand what it says. The U.S. Plain Writing Act of 2010 exists precisely because of this gap — 16 years later, the data shows it hasn't closed.
Real Estate: Most Trusted, Least Accessible
- EEAT: 65.6% (2nd best)
- WCAG: 40.1% (worst)
- Gap: 25.5 percentage points
Real estate agents invest heavily in trust signals — agent photos, credentials, testimonials, company backgrounds, licensing information. These score well on EEAT. But listing pages built around image carousels, interactive maps, and virtual tours fail basic accessibility checks. The industry that earns the most digital trust is the least digitally inclusive.
Health: Most Trusted Content, Hardest to Read
- EEAT: 70.0% (best)
- Readability: 24.0% (3rd worst)
- Gap: 46.0 percentage points
The widest paradox in the data. Health websites have the highest trust scores — medical credentials, institutional backing, peer review, and clinical evidence. But they communicate that expertise in language that patients can't understand. When 89% of U.S. adults have inadequate health literacy, a 24.0% readability pass rate means healthcare content fails the people who most need it.
The YMYL Question
Google's Quality Rater Guidelines single out YMYL content — health, finance, and legal information that can impact a person's wellbeing — for higher scrutiny. Do YMYL sectors actually meet a higher bar?
| Group | Domains | SEO | EEAT | WCAG | Readability |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| YMYL (Health + Finance + Law) | 67,283 | 3.1% | 64.9% | 54.8% | 24.0% |
| Non-YMYL (all others) | 278,949 | 2.2% | 56.5% | 47.7% | 39.8% |
YMYL sectors outperform on three of four dimensions: SEO (+0.9 pp), EEAT (+8.4 pp), and WCAG (+7.1 pp). Google's higher standards appear to work — YMYL sites invest more in discoverability, trust, and accessibility.
The exception is readability: YMYL content is 40% less likely to be readable than non-YMYL content. The sectors where understanding matters most — health decisions, financial choices, legal rights — produce the least comprehensible prose.
This isn't a web-specific problem. It's a structural one. Medical professionals write for other professionals. Lawyers write in legal language. Government officials write in policy prose. The web just made the readability gap visible at scale.
What This Means
-
No industry is uniformly good. Every sector that leads one dimension lags on another. Winning at EEAT doesn't mean you're readable. Winning at WCAG doesn't mean you're trustworthy.
-
Technical competence and content quality are independent. Computer & Electronics sites prove you can build accessible websites while failing at content credibility. Law & Government sites prove you can meet accessibility standards while writing impenetrably.
-
YMYL scrutiny works — partially. Google's higher standards for health, finance, and legal content correlate with measurably higher trust and accessibility. But they haven't solved readability. No search engine rewards plain language directly — and it shows.
-
Shopping gets content right. The sector with the clearest financial incentive to communicate plainly — losing a customer to confusion costs money — is the only one where a majority of content passes readability. Economic incentives drive readability more than regulations do.
-
Entertainment needs SEO badly. At 0.6% SEO pass rate, entertainment sites are 3x worse than the web average. As AI search grows and direct navigation declines, entertainment's SEO debt will become a discoverability crisis.
Methodology
All data from LLMSE's classification database as of March 2026 (1.5M classified URLs). Quality grades from automated analysis: SEO (885,800 graded), EEAT (694,862 graded), WCAG (143,551 graded), Readability (149,889 graded). Pass defined as A+B+C for SEO, EEAT, and WCAG; A+B for readability (Flesch Reading Ease score 50+, approximately 8th-grade level or below). Categories assigned by LLM classification. Sectors with fewer than 10,000 total domains were included but should be interpreted with sample-size awareness.
This analysis was conducted using LLMSE, which has classified over 1.5 million websites across SEO, EEAT, WCAG accessibility, readability, and GARM brand safety dimensions. All data reflects the database as of March 2026. To analyze your own site, visit llmse.ai/classify.