Lost Pines Guide covers Bastrop, Smithville, Elgin, Cedar Creek and the surrounding county. It exists because no local directory tells a business owner the one thing that matters most: whether their website works.
Three things. A directory of 1,051 local businesses, a map of everywhere we have coordinates for, and a scoreboard measuring how well each business's website performs on nine checks.
Listings are free. No membership, no login, no tier, nothing to buy. If you want off the site, you are off the site — one email, no questions.
Two published sources, neither of them a competitor's database:
Where a business's own website publishes structured data about itself, we read hours and details from that too, because the business wrote it and it is the best source available.
Listing here does not imply endorsement or current chamber membership.
Every check is verifiable by viewing the page source. There are no design
opinions in the score and no weighting by popularity, spend or membership. A
site is checked once from a single request to its home page, plus two small
probes for llms.txt and AGENTS.md.
A site that fails to load is recorded as no response, not scored zero. A timeout tells you nothing about a title tag, and pretending otherwise would make the ranking dishonest.
When somebody asks an AI assistant “who does septic work near
Bastrop?”, the assistant reads the site. llms.txt and
AGENTS.md are plain text files that tell it what a business does
and who it serves. Almost no business in this county has one yet, which makes
it the cheapest advantage available here right now.
An events calendar, a podcast and local business features are planned. They are not on the site because they are not built, and a directory full of “coming soon” boxes helps nobody.