Local Business Website Statistics: What We Found Scanning 5,443 of Them

How we did this

Most "state of small business" reports are surveys. Someone emails a few hundred owners, a fraction reply, and the results get rounded into a headline. We wanted to look at what local businesses actually do, not what they say, so we skipped the survey entirely.

We searched Google Maps for 12 industries across 11 US metros: plumbers in Houston, HVAC in Dallas, roofing in Atlanta, electricians in Columbus, landscapers in Denver, pest control in Orlando, auto repair in Phoenix, home remodeling in Nashville, dentists in Chicago, chiropractors in Charlotte, med spas in Scottsdale, and veterinary clinics in Portland. That returned 5,443 real, operating businesses. Then we visited each one's website and recorded what we found: whether a site existed at all, what it ran on, whether it had analytics and security, how fast it loaded, and whether it was set up to be seen by AI.

Every number below comes from a live scan of a real business, not a self-reported survey. Where a business had no website, we counted that too. Here is what the local web actually looks like in 2026.

1. Nearly 1 in 5 local businesses has no website

Across all 5,443 businesses, 17% had no website at all. No landing page, no builder site, nothing. Just a Google Maps listing and a phone number.

That number hides an enormous spread by industry. The businesses your customers research online before buying almost always have a site. The ones people find by proximity or referral often do not:

• Most likely to have no website: auto repair shops (26% have none), dentists (24%), roofing contractors and electricians (19%), landscapers and plumbers (16 to 17%).
• Least likely: veterinary clinics (only 2% have no site), med spas (5%), chiropractors and HVAC contractors (7%).

The pattern is clean: the more a customer researches you online before they walk in or book, the more likely you already have a website. An auto shop wins on being nearby. A med spa wins on trust, so it invests in the site. If you sell websites or digital services, that single split tells you which verticals need a "get online" pitch and which need a "do it better" pitch.

2. A quarter pay for a website they cannot measure

Of the businesses that did have a website, 26% had no analytics installed, no Google Analytics or equivalent. For pest control companies and auto repair shops, it was closer to 1 in 3.

Sit with that for a second. These businesses pay for a website every month, and they cannot answer the most basic question there is: did anyone visit today? They are flying completely blind, and most of them do not know it.

And before you assume these are slow, broken sites: they are not. The median load time across all 4,524 websites we measured was 1.2 seconds, faster than most SaaS marketing pages. The cliche that local businesses have slow websites simply is not true in the data. Speed is not the weakness. Being unmeasured, and as we will see next, invisible to AI, is.

3. The AI visibility divide is already here

This was the most surprising finding of the entire study. Everyone assumes local businesses are years behind on AI. The data says something more interesting: their tools have already made the decision for them, in both directions, and the owners have no idea.

On one side, 20% of the websites already had an llms.txt file, the little text file that tells AI models how to read a site. Almost none of these owners added it on purpose. Their website platform or an SEO plugin generated it automatically. We verified this by hand across a large sample: these are real, valid llms.txt files, not detection errors.

On the other side, about 10% of businesses actively block AI crawlers like GPTBot and ClaudeBot in their robots.txt, which makes them invisible to AI search entirely. Many did not choose this either; it shipped as a default from their host. Add the 28% with no schema markup (the structured data that helps AI and search engines understand a page), and roughly four in ten local businesses are quietly opting out of AI visibility without ever deciding to.

Knowing which businesses are AI-visible and which are invisible is going to be one of the sharpest prospecting signals of the next few years. Right now, almost nobody is looking at it.

4. One in four is already spending on ads

26% of the businesses with a website had an advertising pixel (Facebook, Google, and others). For home remodeling, chiropractors, and med spas, it was closer to 1 in 3.

A pixel tells you two things at once: this business has a budget, and it has already decided that paid acquisition is worth trying. That means any prospect list is really two lists hiding inside one:

• Running a pixel: a "help me do this better" conversation. They already believe in paid growth.
• No pixel: a "here is why you should start" conversation. Different objection, different pitch, different close.

Treating those two groups the same is why so much local outbound falls flat. The data to tell them apart has been sitting on their own websites the whole time.

5. Whether you can reach a named person depends entirely on the industry

We also checked whether each website named a real decision-maker (an owner, a lead practitioner, a named contact). The split by industry is dramatic:

• Practices that sell a person: med spas named a decision-maker on 48% of sites, chiropractors 46%, dentists 33%.
• Trades that sell a service: auto repair named a person on just 12% of sites, electricians 13%, plumbers 16%.

It makes sense once you see it. A med spa or a chiropractor is selling trust in a specific person, so they put a face and a name on the site. A plumber is selling a fixed pipe, so the business name is enough. For outreach, this is the difference between reaching a named owner directly and leading with the business and a specific gap you spotted. Same tool, completely different playbook, and the data tells you which before you send a single message.

6. What actually runs the local web

WordPress remains the backbone of the local web, but it is far from universal. Across the 4,524 sites with a detectable platform:

• WordPress: 32% overall, rising to 45% for dentists and 44% for med spas.
• Wix and Squarespace: around 5% each, with home remodeling skewing higher on Squarespace (12%).
• The rest is a long tail of custom builds, regional agency templates, and platforms we could not fingerprint.

For anyone selling web design, hosting, or plugins, this is the pre-call research you would normally pay for. You can know the platform, the age of the site (21% had a copyright year two or more years old), and the specific gaps before the first conversation.

Turning observations into a prospect list

None of these numbers are interesting on their own. They become useful the moment you can filter for them. "26% have no analytics" is a headline. "Show me the 47 dentists in my city that have a website, no analytics, and a stale copyright year" is a Tuesday afternoon of qualified outreach.

That is the whole point of enriching a business, not just listing it. A raw list of plumbers is a phone book. A list of plumbers that also tells you who has no website, who is running ads, who blocks AI crawlers, and who names an owner is a targeting system. Every signal in this study is a filter you can pull, which is exactly how Lyre Leads is built: search any niche across Google Maps, enrich each result with these data points, and let AI score them against your specific offer.

The gaps in the local web are not a secret. They are sitting on every one of these websites in public. Most people just never look. The ones who do, and who reach out with something true the owner cannot currently see, are the ones who get replies.