We run directories in three trades — grease trap servicing, geothermal installation, and water well drilling. Between them they list 9,918 published contractors across North America.
Because the same fields exist in all three, we can ask something nobody with a single directory can: do these trades behave differently online? They do — but the difference is not where we expected to find it, and one number is the same dismal story in all three.
What the numbers say
Almost every contractor in all three trades lists a phone number — 99%. After that they diverge sharply: 95.2% of grease trap contractors have a website against 64.0% of well drillers. But not one of the three trades reaches 56% on publishing opening hours, and the trade with the most websites publishes its hours least often of all.
Live counts from GreaseTrapLocator, GeothermalFinder and WellDrillerFinder, 3 August 2026.
The table
| What we measured | Grease trap | Geothermal | Water well |
|---|---|---|---|
| Contractors listed | 1,914 | 2,357 | 5,647 |
| Has a phone number | 99.6% | 99.2% | 99.4% |
| Has a website | 95.2% | 91.1% | 64.0% |
| Holds opening hours stating a clock time | 43.5% | 55.9% | 53.1% |
| Has at least one review | 55.2% | 52.8% | 71.3% |
The one thing all three trades agree on
Ninety-nine per cent of contractors in all three trades list a phone number. That is as close to unanimous as data gets, and it is worth pausing on, because it says something about how this work is actually bought.
These are not businesses that expect to be chosen from a form. They expect the phone to ring, and they have made sure it can.
Websites diverge more than anything else
After the phone number, the three trades stop resembling each other. 95.2% of grease trap contractors have a website. Only 64.0% of well drillers do — more than a third of that trade has no site at all. Geothermal sits at 91.1%, close to grease trap.
That is a thirty-one point gap between two trades doing physically similar work for overlapping customers, and it is the largest difference in the whole dataset.
The finding we did not expect
Here is what stopped us. Having a website tells you almost nothing about whether a contractor publishes the things a customer uses to choose them.
The trade with the most websites publishes its opening hours least often. 95.2% of grease trap contractors have a site; 43.5% will say when they are open. Geothermal, with slightly fewer websites, leads on hours at 55.9%. Water well — a third of it with no website at all — still beats grease trap on hours, at 53.1%.
And the ceiling is low everywhere. Not one of these three trades reaches 56%. Across all 9,918 contractors, fewer than three in five will tell you when they are open. This is not a story about one trade being behind. It is a story about a field nobody in any of these trades fills in.
We wrote about the sharpest version of this in the grease trap trade, where 87% advertise round-the-clock availability while 43.5% publish hours. That gap is the widest of the three, but the underlying neglect is common to all of them.
What counts as publishing your hours
This finding depends entirely on a judgement we made, so we are going to show you the judgement rather than the conclusion alone.
640 water well listings — 11.3% of that directory — have the words “Call for hours” in the opening-hours field. That is text. It is not opening hours. It is the field telling you to do the thing you were trying to avoid.
We counted a listing as publishing its hours only when the field contains an actual clock time, or says the business never closes. On the looser rule — any non-empty field — water well would come out at 64.4% and would appear to lead the three trades on this measure. On the stricter rule it comes second, at 53.1%.
We think the stricter rule is the honest one, because a customer at nine on a Friday night cannot use “Call for hours”. But it is a choice, it changes the ranking, and you are entitled to disagree with it. Both numbers are above.
The same problem, smaller, exists in the grease trap data: 28 listings hold an empty list rather than nothing at all — a blank field wearing a costume. Those are counted as blank.
Which position is better to be in?
The instinct is that 95% website coverage looks healthier than 64%. We think that reads it backwards.
A website is a brochure. Hours and reviews are what somebody uses to choose, in the moment they are choosing. A trade where seven in ten operators carry reviews is a trade where the basics of being picked are widely covered — even though a third of it has no website at all.
A trade where nearly everyone has a website but fewer than half will say when they are open has invested in the thing that gets looked at and skipped the thing that gets acted on.
On reviews, water well is genuinely ahead: 71.3% carry at least one, against 55.2% and 52.8%. We would rather be the well driller with no website and real reviews than the grease trap contractor with a smart site and none.
Why the trades might differ
We can measure the difference. We cannot prove why it exists, and we would rather flag that than write a confident-sounding explanation of our own data. Two things seem likely, and both are checkable against your own experience.
Water well work is more consumer-facing. A homeowner needing a well chooses a contractor the way they choose a plumber — from a map, on reviews, at a moment of need. Trades whose customers behave that way tend to accumulate reviews whether or not the contractor is trying, which fits the 71.3%.
Grease trap work is more commercially contracted. The customer is a restaurant group or a facilities manager, often on a recurring service agreement. Reviews matter less when the buying decision is a contract renewal, and the website exists to look credible when a procurement person checks — not to convert a stranger at nine on a Friday.
If that is right, the grease trap gap is not carelessness. It is a rational response to who buys the work — which becomes a problem only when the trade also wants the walk-up emergency business, and finds it is invisible in exactly the moment that decision gets made.
What to do, whichever trade you are in
Look at the row your trade is worst on.
Grease trap: publish your hours. More than half your trade has not, and you are competing on emergency availability against people who will not say when they are open.
Water well: you are ahead on reviews, which is the thing that converts. If you are in the third with no website at all, the gap is credibility on the larger jobs — a well and pump package is a considered purchase, and above a certain price people want to look at you properly before calling. And if your hours field says “Call for hours”, that is a two-minute fix that moves you past half your trade.
Geothermal: you lead on hours and sit mid-table on everything else, in a trade where the buying decision takes months. Neither a brochure nor a single review is doing much work over that span; being present across a long consideration period is a different problem, and a longer one.
How we measured this
All counts are live from three directories on 3 August 2026: GreaseTrapLocator (1,914 published listings), GeothermalFinder (2,357) and WellDrillerFinder (5,647). Read-only counts of listing fields.
Four caveats we would rather state than have you find. A blank field means the field is blank — a contractor may publish hours on their own site and leave ours empty. This measures listings, not businesses. Coverage varies by trade and region — these are our directories, not censuses, and the three were built at different times from different sources, which could itself explain part of the gap. The hours rule is a judgement, set out in full above, and it changes which trade ranks first. And none of these review counts is a review left on our directories. There are zero reviews on GreaseTrapLocator and zero on GeothermalFinder; every count in all three is imported from the business’s public presence elsewhere. For grease trap and water well that source is Google, which we can confirm from the listing records themselves. For geothermal the count carries no source information we can verify, so we can tell you it is imported but not from where — treat that column as the softest of the three.
This is directory measurement, not client results. We have no client results in these trades to report, and we say so on the evidence page.
Corrections, 4 August 2026
The opening-hours row was mislabelled, and that is the most important thing on this page. It read “Publishes actual opening times”. The percentages were right about how many listings held hours stating a real clock time — but they were not what the directories were showing, and the label said published. At the time this went out, GeothermalFinder and WellDrillerFinder were displaying opening hours on none of their listings, and GreaseTrapLocator on 26.0%, not 43.5%. The cause was a storage-format mismatch: hours held as free text were skipped by the page template and never rendered. The data was there the whole time; the pages did not show it. That is now fixed, all three genuinely publish, and the row is relabelled to say what it actually measured.
The geothermal review figure was not comparable with the other two. It read 55.1%, which counted review data captured; the grease trap and water well figures counted what is displayed. On the same basis as its neighbours geothermal is 52.8% (1,244 of 2,355), and the table now says so. A related caveat in this post was also wrong and worth correcting because it argued against our own data: it said water well review counts come from Google while the other two were directory reviews. Not so — none of the three directories holds any on-site reviews at all, so every figure in that row is a Google count and the columns are directly comparable.
Two listing counts have moved since this was measured. Two geothermal listings were unpublished on 4 August because their own source data recorded them as closed. Geothermal is now 2,355 rather than 2,357, and the three-trade total 9,916 rather than 9,918. The figures above describe the position on 3 August, which is when they were taken, and are left as measured.
A separate hours fault, found in the same check. 346 water well listings displayed “12:00 AM – 12:00 PM” every day — a botched conversion of “Open 24 hours”, traced back through 93 checkable cases in the original source data with no counter-examples. It changed no figure here: those listings state a clock time either way. It is corrected because it was wrong. And the 640 “Call for hours” entries discussed above have been cleared — they were never visible to visitors, which is precisely why counting them as published hours would have been wrong.
We would rather show you a correction than quietly edit a number.
Published by Groundline Marketing, 3 August 2026. Corrected 4 August 2026.