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The burden of peripheral artery disease is significant for public health but the readily available on-line information on the disease is poorly studied. This study seeks to evaluate the quality and readability of patient resources and identify gaps that appear in the top search results for peripheral artery disease.

Internet searches were performed for “PAD” and “Peripheral Artery Disease” and “PVD” on three search engines and two metasearch engines. The top 30 websites from each search engine were compiled, screened, and evaluated across four categories of information to assess overall quality: accountability, interactivity, structure, and content. Four indices were used to evaluate readability of the text for the viewer. Statistical analyses was performed using Rstudio with ANOVA.

Sixty-three websites met inclusion criteria, of which 25 were open access (34.9%), 30 were from hospital …