How the Squamish report was made

Two reads, six weeks apart.

The report rests on two separate reads of the same town, run about six weeks apart. The first, in August 2026, mapped every business in Squamish I could find and checked each one the way a customer would: opened the site, tried to book or contact, tapped the phone number, looked at it on a phone as well as a desktop. It found 889 candidates, of which 12 were closed or gone, leaving 877 open businesses as the base for everything else in the report. 716 of those 877 were read in a real browser, on desktop and on phone.

The second, in September 2026, is narrower and asks a different question: not whether a business's front door works, but how work actually reaches it once a customer gets through. Of the 877 open businesses, 755 had a website of their own, and 642 of those could be read that month. This census looked specifically at booking, quote, order and enquiry paths, and named the software behind each one wherever a vendor's signature was clear enough to identify.

The two reads use different methods and answer different questions, so their figures are never merged into one number. A finding from August is always an August finding, and a finding from September is always a September one, labeled that way wherever it appears in the report.

How the 877 were mapped, and what open means.

Mapping started from ordinary discovery: searching the categories a customer would search, in Squamish, the way someone actually looking for a business would. Every candidate that turned up was checked again before it counted, to rule out a business that had closed, moved away, or never really operated at that address.

Open means exactly that: as far as I could tell from the outside, on the day I checked, the business was still operating. It does not mean thriving, and it does not mean healthy. A business can be open and still have a website that has not loaded properly in a year. 877 is the number of open businesses the read confirmed, and it is the denominator behind almost every other figure in the report.

What one browser audit checked.

Each of the 716 audited businesses was put through the same four checks, in a normal browser, the way a customer actually arrives: does the path a customer takes actually finish, whether that is a booking, an order, a quote request or a message; does the site hold together on a phone as well as a desktop; does the listed phone number reach the business it claims to, rather than a wrong number or someone else's office; and is the domain itself alive, rather than expired, parked, or quietly redirected somewhere unrelated. Those four checks are the front door. What sits behind it, pricing, service quality, how a call gets handled once it connects, was outside the read.

Every audited business landed in one of four outcomes: clear, meaning the path works; severity 3, worth an hour of somebody's time but not blocking anyone; severity 4, meaning real customers are being lost partway through, the front door opens but does not lead anywhere useful; and severity 5, meaning the door is closed outright, a customer flatly cannot get through. Among the 716 audited, 399 came back clear, 61 at severity 3, 68 at severity 4 and 44 at severity 5, accounting for 572. A further 96 had no real website to audit in the first place (122 of the 877 open businesses have no real website at all), and the remaining 48 recorded a status without a severity verdict, closing out the 716.

The four checks are a plain version of the same questions any read of a public business surface eventually asks: can a customer find the right thing without guessing, can they see enough to trust it, and can they actually take the next step without giving up. This report answers only the last of those, and answers it as a pass or fail on the day of the read, not as a scored diagnostic of the whole business.

What the report will not show you.

Three rules run through every figure in the report. A category only gets its own row once ten or more open businesses in it were read; below that, a rate would describe two or three specific businesses closely enough to guess who they are. Any count that would fall under five, inside a category row, is shown as "fewer than 5" rather than the real number, for the same reason. Every percentage in the report is calculated town-wide, never inside a category too small to hide behind.

No business is named anywhere in the report, on this page, or in any figure derived from either read. Not the businesses doing well, and not the businesses with the worst findings. The report describes the town in aggregate; it was never built to be a directory of who is broken.

The fourteen categories the report can name.

Fourteen categories in the August read had ten or more open businesses, which is the only reason they can appear by name at all. Each figure below reads as severity 4 or 5 findings of open businesses read in that category, from the same 716-audit set described above.

Electrician

4 of 14

Day care center

3 of 11

Naturopathic practitioner

3 of 12

House cleaning service

2 of 10

Restaurant

2 of 18

Coffee shop

1 of 10

Construction company

1 of 11

Gym

1 of 11

Auto repair shop

1 of 12

Massage therapist

1 of 20

Real estate agency

0 of 18

Plumber

0 of 12

Real estate agent

0 of 11

Website designer

0 of 10

What these figures cannot tell you.

The report shows what a customer would have run into on the day of the read, nothing more. It does not say why a given category struggles, and it does not attach a dollar figure to any finding: a severity 5 result means a path is closed, not a number lost, because a read like this cannot see a business's actual bookings or sales.

It is also a dated snapshot, not a running measurement. August and September 2026 are the only two dates behind these numbers so far. A business open today could have fixed the exact problem the report found last week, and the report would not know until the next edition. Treat every figure here as true on the day it was read, not as a permanent verdict on any category or on the town as a whole.

How to cite a figure.

Every section and every exhibit in the report carries its own cite line, so a reference points to a specific place in the report rather than to the whole document. The format is: "Cite: byImprint Research, The State of the Squamish Surface, 2nd edition (September 2026), Exhibit C. byimprint.com/squamish#exhibit-c", naming the exhibit and the anchor used.

The eight exhibits in the report run from #exhibit-a to #exhibit-h, in the order they appear. Link directly to the anchor for the figure you are citing, not just to the report's front page, so a reader lands on the same table or chart you are quoting from.

Figures are reproducible on request; the underlying rows are not published.

That sentence appears once in the report and holds everywhere in it: any aggregate figure can be checked against the read's own records on request. What is not published is the row-by-row data behind it, one line per business.

Two reasons sit behind that line. Google Maps content, which fed part of the discovery and review figures, is not mine to redistribute in bulk; its terms permit reading it, not republishing it as a dataset. And byImprint's own browser observations, the part that is genuinely mine, are reported the way the rest of the report reports everything: in aggregate, with no business named, never as a list a reader could search for their own address.

Editions.

August 2026 is the report's first edition: the original town read, 877 open businesses, 716 audited. September 2026 is the second edition, adding the intake census above; it changes nothing in the August figures, only adds to them.

A further edition is planned for December 2026, and again in March and June 2027, each re-reading the same 877 businesses on the same method, so change becomes visible over time rather than argued about from a single read. Each edition is dated and kept separate from the ones before it, the way August and September already are.