Other vendor surveys — Smart Insights, The Manifest — converge on low SEO literacy

Claim: Other vendor surveys directionally agree with Fractl SEO knowledge-gap survey — only 26% of business owners claim "good" or "expert" SEO understanding:

• A survey of 500 US small-business owners (reported via Smart Insights / Numiko, a UK digital agency) found over one-third had no understanding of SEO and over half only "basic" understanding.
• The Manifest (2020) reported only ~30% of small businesses use SEO at all.

Caveat: All vendor-originated. Smart Insights/Numiko sells digital-marketing services; The Manifest is a B2B vendor-listing/lead-gen site. Incentives to portray SMBs as under-served by SEO.

Confidence: Single-source each; directional consensus across independent commercial surveys.

Why this matters for Candid: The direction is solid: owners reliably understand the existence of keywords, that Google ranks results, that they personally run ads, and that reviews matter. They systematically misunderstand HOW rankings are determined, backlinks/authority, "optimization," and their relative ranking. The widget should not ask about any of the latter.