Forty-six trade schools. One of them passes all four checks.
We ran the four checks a prospective student runs, on 46 private trade and vocational schools across 14 US metros. Twenty of them appear nowhere that student looks. Get the full benchmark, free, by email, right now.
Send me the benchmark
One field. The document opens in your browser, so you can read it in the next two minutes.
- No school is named. The benchmark is aggregated and anonymized, including for the school you run.
- Full method included: the exact queries, the tools, the dates, and what this does not prove.
- We did not measure your school, and this document does not pretend to. It ends with a ten minute self check you run yourself.
That is the whole form. The link arrives by email right away, and it is on the confirmation page too, so you are not waiting on your inbox.
Read two of those numbers together
87% built the page. 52% show up. Seventeen of the 46 schools have a real, live, dedicated page for the program they teach, and still do not appear in Google's top 10 when someone in their own city searches for that program.
The page is not the bottleneck. Nobody finding the page is. That gap is the reason this benchmark exists: almost every school we measured has already done the work everyone tells them to do, it is published, and it is not reaching anybody.
What is in the document
Four checks, five trades, one method section you can argue with.
It is a web page, not a download. You get the link by email and it stays live, so you can send it to whoever else in the school needs to see the numbers.
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The four checks, with the number behind each one.
Program page, published price, Google top 10, and whether ChatGPT and Google's AI Overview name the school.
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A per trade breakdown in raw counts.
Welding, HVAC, automotive, medical assisting and cosmetology, in counts rather than percentages, because a percentage computed on four schools is a decoration.
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A ten minute self check.
So you can place your own school in the benchmark, with the number to compare against at each step, without anyone measuring you.
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The full method.
The exact queries, the dates, the tools, and what the numbers do not prove.
One table from the document, before you give an email
The trade by trade counts.
Judge the rest of the benchmark on this. Raw counts, not percentages, and the mix is the one the sector actually has rather than a balanced sample we picked.
| Trade | Schools | Top 10 | Named by ChatGPT | Program page | Price published |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cosmetology, barbering, esthetics | 20 | 11 | 6 | 16 | 1 |
| Medical assisting | 9 | 5 | 3 | 9 | 1 |
| Automotive and diesel | 8 | 5 | 3 | 7 | 1 |
| Welding | 5 | 2 | 1 | 5 | 0 |
| HVAC and refrigeration | 4 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 1 |
Welding and HVAC are the two groups where the ratio of "has the page" to "shows up" is worst, and they are also the two smallest groups here, so read that as a question worth checking on your own school, not as a conclusion about your trade.
How it was measured
The short version of the method, so you know what you are asking for.
The long version is in the document, and it is the section that makes the rest of it worth anything. If any of it does not hold up, the numbers do not either.
- Sample
- 46 private trade and vocational schools across 14 metros: Phoenix, Tucson and Glendale (AZ), Las Vegas (NV), Denver (CO), San Diego (CA), Houston, San Antonio and El Paso (TX), Miami and Orlando (FL), Augusta (GA), Chicago (IL), Baltimore (MD). Every live school in those metros teaching one of the five trades was included, with no selection on the result. Of 370 domains tested, 191 answered.
- Date
- All four measures were taken on September 9, 2026. Search results and model answers move. Nothing here is a trend, and re-running it next month would give different numbers.
- Queries and tools
- Google organic results through DataForSEO, desktop, English, geolocated to each school's own metro, top 20 parsed, on "{trade} school in {city}" and "best {trade} school in {city}". ChatGPT with web search enabled, one fresh session per query, no history and no personalization. Program pages and published prices: direct crawl of each school's own website, homepage plus program and cost pages within two clicks.
- What it does not measure
- Enrollment, cost per lead, revenue, or whether any of this converts. It measures visibility on one day, on five trades, in fourteen cities, with one model and one phrasing per question.
- Why no school is named
- Naming a school for its gaps in a document meant to circulate would expose a third party who never agreed to be measured. We would not want it done to us.
Before you give an email address
Who this is for, and what it is not.
Worth your ten minutes if
- You own, direct, or run admissions or marketing for a private trade or vocational school in the US.
- You already have program pages published and you are not sure they reach anyone.
- You want a number to compare your own school against, and you would rather measure it yourself than be sold a diagnosis.
Not what you are getting
- Not an audit of your school. We did not measure you, and we do not ask for your website.
- Not a forecast. No enrollment numbers, no cost per lead, no revenue, no results from our own clients.
- Not a trend. One day of measurement, five trades, fourteen cities, one model, one phrasing per question.
Who published this
Scalenroll INC, Scottsdale, Arizona. We build the organic side of an enrollment pipeline for trade and vocational schools. Our engagement is the Full Ecosystem Run, three months, and it covers the four things this benchmark measures: program pages that can actually rank, the pricing and proof a candidate needs before calling, local search positions, and how a school gets cited when the question is asked to a model instead of a search bar.
Two things we would rather say here than in a first call. Organic is not fast: three months is when a system is built and starting to move, not when the pipeline is full. And the benchmark contains no client results on purpose. Everything in it is a measurement of other people's websites, taken on one day, and that is all it claims to be.
Twenty of the forty-six appear nowhere a student looks.
Four of them publish what the program costs. One clears all four checks. The full benchmark, the per trade counts, the ten minute self check and the complete method are on one page, and the link is one email away.
- No school is named.
- Full method included: the exact queries, the tools, the dates, and what this does not prove.
- We did not measure your school, and this document does not pretend to.
One field, and the link arrives right away. It is on the confirmation page too.