New Orleans feeds 19 million visitors. Most of its websites went stale in 2012.

New Orleans's tourism economy is among the most search-driven in America: millions of visitors a year — convention crowds, festival weekends, bachelor and bachelorette parties — making same-day decisions about restaurants, tours, hotels, and music from a phone on a French Quarter sidewalk. The restaurants and inns with fast mobile sites, current menus, and easy booking capture those decisions block by block; the ones with dated sites lose them to whoever Google serves up first. In a city where hospitality is the export, the website is the storefront most visitors see before any door.

The other economy runs on the storm calendar. Every hurricane season — and every named storm that brushes the Gulf — sends the entire metro searching for roofers, contractors, remediation, and tree services simultaneously, and homeowners here screen hard: Katrina and a generation of storm-chaser outfits taught New Orleans to vet legitimacy ruthlessly. License, local address, real project photos, a site that loads when the whole parish is searching at once — those signals decide who gets the rebuild work. And the metro's geography fragments the market the Southern way: Metairie and Kenner search separately from Orleans Parish, and the Northshore — Covington, Mandeville, Slidell — is effectively its own market across the lake. Per-area pages are how one firm works all of it.