{
  "slug": "lead-response-time-calgary-2026",
  "generated_at": "2026-09-21T16:51:35.983Z",
  "corpus_size": 395,
  "n_fetch_ok": 326,
  "data_collected": "2026-09-21",
  "sample_frame": "Calgary businesses appearing in curated \"best of Calgary\" listicles that own an outbound-linkable website, the same frame as the 2026 one-tap contact and AI-blocking studies.",
  "verticals": "restaurants, gyms, cafes, contractors, dental, medical aesthetics, law, auto, mortgage brokers, retail",
  "method": "For each corpus site, fetched the homepage and up to two same-origin contact, quote or booking pages as served (5 hop redirect limit, 15s timeout, 5MB max, no JavaScript executed). Recorded: presence of an enquiry form after excluding search-only and email-only newsletter forms, whether that form requests a phone number, its visible field count, tel: links, embedded live chat (16 providers) and booking widgets (14 providers), published business hours, 24/7 or emergency claims, and any sentence promising a reply. Promise sentences were split into those naming a time window and those claiming speed without one, with consent language excluded, and every timed promise was then read by hand.",
  "limits": "Convenience sample, not a random draw: listicle inclusion plausibly favours better-resourced businesses, so these figures read as a favourable estimate. HTML as served only, so anything injected by JavaScript is invisible and a site may offer chat, a form or a booking widget this study does not see. Widget detection matches known provider URLs, so a self-built widget is missed. 20 timed promises were detected and 2 rejected on review: one was a vendor site whose matched sentence was product marketing, one sat inside a customer testimonial. The frame retains a small number of non-Calgary and non-business hosts that survived the original exclusion list. 69 of 395 sites did not return a usable page, mostly bot blocks and dead domains.",
  "naming_policy": "Sites publishing a timed response promise are named, since that is the practice the study rewards. All other sites are hashed.",
  "headline": "Only 5.5% of Calgary business websites tell a customer when they will reply, and 22.4% run an enquiry form that never asks for a phone number.",
  "sample_label": "395 Calgary business websites, 326 fetched and parsed",
  "collected_label": "September 2026",
  "key_findings": [
    {
      "value": "5.5%",
      "claim": "Sites publishing a response promise that names a time window, hand-verified"
    },
    {
      "value": "22.4%",
      "claim": "Sites running an enquiry form that never asks for a phone number, so a fast callback is impossible"
    },
    {
      "value": "15.6%",
      "claim": "Sites offering neither an enquiry form nor a tap-to-call link"
    },
    {
      "value": "8.3%",
      "claim": "Sites with instant booking, which removes the wait instead of shortening it"
    },
    {
      "value": "4.6%",
      "claim": "Sites with a live chat widget embedded"
    },
    {
      "value": "54.3%",
      "claim": "Sites publishing their business hours"
    }
  ],
  "citation": "Meridian15 (2026). The Five-Minute Lead Rule: What It Rests On, and What 326 Calgary Sites Do. https://fifteenthmeridian.com/blog/lead-response-time-calgary-2026",
  "reuse": "Quote any figure with a link to the study URL. Method, limits and the full result table are published beside it."
}