We audited 2,661 local business websites. Here is what is actually broken.

We audited 2,661 local business websites across 19 cities. The headline finding is not the one we expected: most local businesses have a perfectly serviceable website. The gap has moved somewhere else entirely.

The basics are largely solved

For years the standard pitch to a local business was that their site was not secure and did not work on a phone. That pitch has mostly run out of road.

Only 4.5 per cent of the sites we audited were still served over plain HTTP, and only 2.3 per cent lacked a mobile viewport tag. Two thirds scored 80 or above. Just 3 per cent were in genuinely poor shape.

If you are still opening conversations with 'your site is not mobile friendly', you are describing a problem that roughly one business in forty actually has.

The real gap is metadata and machine readability

The most common fault by a wide margin was a title tag outside the 30 to 60 character range, at 52.3 per cent. Just over half of all local business websites are not making proper use of the single most valuable piece of text they control.

Nearly a quarter had no meta description at all, and another 27.9 per cent had one outside the useful length. Together that is over half of sites leaving their search snippet to chance.

Almost a third, 31.8 per cent, published no structured data whatsoever. This is the finding with the longest tail, because structured data is how a business states its hours, location and services in a form machines do not have to guess at.

Nearly a quarter of businesses have no website at all

Of the 4,317 businesses we found across those searches, 939 had no website listed anywhere we could verify. That is 21.8 per cent.

This is the easiest conversation in the entire market. There is no existing site to critique, no incumbent developer to displace, and no debate about whether the current site is good enough.

Some industries are much further behind than others

The spread between verticals is wider than the spread within them. Lawyers averaged 88.8 and dentists 87.6. Beauty salons averaged 65.9 and car repair workshops 67.7.

The pattern is not about budget so much as about who built the site. Professional services tend to have commissioned a developer. Personal services and trades are far more likely to be running a template a family member set up, or a page produced by a booking platform.

Restaurants are the interesting case: a large sample, a middling average of 76.2, and thin content as their second most common fault. A menu image with no accompanying text gives a search engine almost nothing to work with.

What this means if you sell websites or SEO

Stop leading with HTTPS and mobile. Those problems are largely fixed, and raising them signals that you have not actually looked at the site.

Lead with the title tag. It is the most common fault, it is trivially verifiable by the business owner in a browser tab, and the fix takes minutes.

Treat structured data as the forward-looking pitch. As AI assistants and answer engines take a larger share of queries, machine-readable facts matter more than they did, and roughly a third of local businesses have none.

For the businesses with no website at all, do not send an audit. There is nothing to audit. Send an example of what their competitor down the road has.

Every fault, by how common it is

Share of the 2,661 audited websites carrying each fault. Each links to a guide explaining the fix.

How the scores were distributed

Average score by industry

Categories with fewer than ten audited sites are excluded. Smaller samples should be read as a direction rather than a measurement.

Method and limitations