Three businesses scored a perfect score for the first time in Gomez?s benchmark study for August: Bank of America, American Airlines and Northwest Airlines.

Last month?s benchmark study hinted that both the banking and airline industries were falling behind the mobile curve, with the exception of Jet Blue, but Bank of America, American Airlines and Northwest Airlines have proven their worth in the mobile Web performance space. On the whole, mobile airline and search industries are still outperforming the mobile banking industry.

?Mobile airline and search Web sites continued to outperform banking Web sites during the period,? said Matthew Poepsel, vice president of performance management strategies at Gomez, Lexington, MA 

?While there were a few firms that moved slightly in the rankings, there were no major improvements or degradations in August," he said.

Three new firms earned perfect five-bar scores for the period: Bank of America, American Airlines and Northwest Airlines.

While some companies struggle to deliver against end-user expectations, these companies show that it?s possible to deliver excellent mobile experiences.

The Web performance benchmarks from Gomez and dotMobi take into account different aspects of mobile Web performance such as discoverability, readiness, availability, response time and consistency.

Search benchmarks
While Google and Amazon battled it out for the No. 1 ranking across the different pillars of performance success, AOL came out on top in the five-bar summary.

However, in terms of discoverability and readiness, Google placed first with a perfect score of five bars in both categories.

On the other hand, Amazon led in categories of availability, response time and consistency.

Gomez reports that Amazon.com averages 99.8 percent availability, followed closely by Google at 99.5 percent.

Amazon?s average response time of 2.94 seconds just barely beat Google?s 3.33-second response time.

In terms of consistency, Amazon (3.06 seconds) finished a nose ahead of Google (3.73 seconds).

Despite the close race between these two powerhouses, AOL came out on top due to its consistent scoring across all categories.

?With mobile Web usage continuing to rise, now is the time to both understand end-user experiences and optimize them,? Mr. Poepsel said.

?There seems to be a big difference between the ?haves? and the ?have nots? in terms of mobile end-user experience,? he said. ?This is likely to translate into big differences in end-user perceptions of quality and value.?

Airline benchmarks
While JetBlue maintained its five-star status, it was joined by rival airlines American Airlines and Northwest Airlines. American beat out JetBlue, last month?s leader for the No. 1 spot in mobile Web performance.

Some of the lowest-ranked airlines were Continental, Delta and US Airways, which only scored one out of five bars.

Banking benchmarks
Bank of America ranked No. 1 in mobile Web performance in August with a perfect score, clearly beating out Chase, U.S. Bank and Wells Fargo, all of which scored three bars.

Among the lowest-ranked banks were Washington Mutual, now owned by Chase, and Citizens.

?Mobile Web site owners need to trim any unnecessary content or weight from their applications,? Mr. Poepsel said. ?Mobile response times still lag considerably behind their traditional Web application response times.

?Mobile end-users may be willing to tolerate some latency in exchange for mobile convenience, but they will not stare at their screens too long before clicking over to the competition or abandoning their mobile Web sessions,? he said.