We Scored Every Pub in Chepstow. The Average Was 39 Out of 100.
We scored 26 pubs in and around Chepstow on the same seven pillars we used for 884 pubs across 23 UK brewery estates. The Chepstow average came out at 39.2 out of 100.
The national average across those 884 pubs was 53.
That is a gap of nearly fourteen points, and it is not because Chepstow has bad pubs. It has some very good ones. It is because Chepstow's pubs are overwhelmingly independent, and independence is exactly what this particular scoring system punishes.
What the Numbers Say
Of the 26 pubs scored, 11 landed in Band C (At Risk) and 15 in Band D (Critical). Not one reached Band B.
The highest score in the town was 58. The lowest was 20. For comparison, the highest scoring pub in the national 884 pub dataset reached 76, and 7 pubs nationally made Band B.
So Chepstow's best pub, digitally speaking, would sit mid table nationally. Its weakest are close to the floor.
The composition explains a lot. 18 of the 26 are independents, with 6 chain or managed houses and 2 others. An independent pub has one person doing the marketing, and that person is also doing the cellar, the rota and the ordering. A managed house has a marketing department somewhere. The scoring does not care which, and the results follow.
Why This Is Not a Verdict on the Pubs
Worth being explicit, because this is our own town and these are pubs we drink in.
The Pub Health Index measures digital presence. It does not measure beer quality, food, welcome, atmosphere, or whether a pub is any good. A pub can score 25 and be the best pub in the county. Several of the lower scores here belong to places that are busy most nights on reputation and footfall alone, and have never needed a website to fill the room.
It also does not measure whether the pub cares. A landlord who has decided social media is not for them scores identically to one who set up a Facebook page in 2019 and forgot the password.
What the score does measure is what a stranger sees. Someone driving through, staying at a hotel nearby, or visiting Tintern for the abbey, deciding on a phone where to eat. That person cannot taste your beer. They can only see what is online, and in Chepstow there is not much of it.
The Heritage Nobody Is Using
The oddest thing in the Chepstow data is how much material is going unused.
This is a town with a Norman castle, a medieval wall, and pubs with genuine history attached. One of the hotels on the list has been trading since around 1650. That is 376 years of continuous business, in a building with a documented past, in a town people visit specifically because it is old.
Almost none of that appears anywhere online. Content Quality was among the weakest pillars nationally, averaging 3.07 out of 10, and Chepstow is not an exception to that.
A pub with four centuries of history and no story on its website is leaving the single most defensible thing it owns on the table. Every town has pubs. Chepstow has pubs that were serving beer before the English Civil War. Nobody else can copy that, and it costs nothing to write down. We have argued this more generally in your pub's history is your best marketing asset.
What Would Move the Number
The pillars dragging Chepstow down are the cheap ones, which is the encouraging part.
Nationally, Digital Responsiveness averages 6.14 out of 15 and Social Engagement 3.02 out of 15. Those are the two that need no budget at all. Replying to reviews is free. Posting twice a week is free. Neither requires a website rebuild, a photographer, or an agency.
A Chepstow pub that replied to its reviews, finished its Google Business Profile and posted a couple of times a week would move from Band D to Band C inside a couple of months, and would be visibly ahead of most of the town within six.
The bar here is low enough to step over. That is not a criticism of anyone. It is the honest state of a market where nobody has bothered yet, and it will not stay that way indefinitely.
The Full Table
Every pub we scored is published, with its score and its band, on the Chepstow Pub Health Index. We have not hidden the low ones and we have not editorialised about individual pubs.
If you run one of them and think the score is wrong, it might be. The most common error is a missed account, usually because the pub trades under a slightly different name than its Facebook page. Email [email protected] and we will re-score it.
If you would rather work out your own score privately first, the audit checklist uses the same pillars and takes about twenty minutes. There is nothing to sign up for.
Why We Started Here
Chepstow is where we are based, which is the honest reason. It also made a useful test: 26 pubs in one small area, scored the same week, with no estate-level marketing department flattering the results.
The national 884 pub study told us what the average looks like across large brewery estates. Chepstow told us what it looks like on a single high street full of independents, and the answer is that it is worse, and that the gap is entirely in the pillars that cost nothing but time.
Further reading:
- The Chepstow Pub Health Index: all 26 pubs, scored and ranked
- The Pub Health Index methodology: how the seven pillars work
- The 80/20 Report: the national picture across 884 pubs
- Google Business Profile for Pubs: the cheapest fix available
Tom Fairhall is the founder of Pub Post Pro and lives near Chepstow. The 26 local pubs were scored in early 2026 using publicly available data, on the same seven pillar index applied to 884 pubs across 23 UK brewery estates.