We audited 2,509 local business websites. Here's what's actually broken.
We audited 2,509 local business websites across 33 cities, counting each site once. 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 4.3 per cent of the sites we audited were still served over plain HTTP, and only 2.8 per cent lacked a mobile viewport tag. More than three in five scored 80 or above, and just 3.2 per cent scored under 40.
If you're still opening conversations with 'your site isn't mobile friendly', you're describing a problem that roughly one business in 36 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 54.4 per cent. More than half of all local business websites aren't making proper use of the single most valuable piece of text they control.
More than a quarter, 26.1 per cent, 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.
More than a quarter, 28.5 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 don't have to guess at.
More than a third of businesses have no website at all
Of the 8,949 businesses we found across those searches, 3,200 had no website listed anywhere we could verify. That is 35.8 per cent, and it's the biggest opportunity in this study. It is a conservative count: any business whose name turned up with a website in another search is left out of it.
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 87.0. Hairdressers averaged 68.2 and bakeries 72.6.
The pattern isn't 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: the largest sample in the study, 1,305 sites, a middling average of 78.0, and thin content near the top of their faults. 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's the most common fault, it's 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 more than a quarter of local businesses have none.
For the businesses with no website at all, don't 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 2,509 audited websites carrying each fault. Each links to a guide explaining the fix.
How the scores were distributed
| Score | Share | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| 80 to 100 | 63% | Broadly healthy. Minor metadata faults at worst. |
| 60 to 79 | 26% | Workable, with several fixable faults. |
| 40 to 59 | 8% | Multiple structural problems. |
| 0 to 39 | 3% | Seriously broken, or barely a website at all. |
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.
| Industry | Sites | Average score |
|---|---|---|
| Funeral homes | 11 | 89.6 |
| Lawyers | 42 | 88.8 |
| Dentists | 460 | 87.0 |
| Dental practices | 24 | 86.7 |
| Podiatrists | 14 | 85.9 |
| Car dealers | 55 | 84.1 |
| Real estate agents | 31 | 83.9 |
| Dental clinics | 12 | 83.6 |
| Driving schools | 14 | 82.9 |
| Plumbers | 11 | 82.6 |
| Clothing retailers | 100 | 82.1 |
| Accountants | 136 | 79.6 |
| Florists | 10 | 79.6 |
| Doctors and medical practices | 58 | 79.3 |
| Hardware stores | 11 | 78.8 |
| Pharmacies | 44 | 78.7 |
| Restaurants | 1,305 | 78.0 |
| Car repair workshops | 36 | 76.7 |
| Beauty salons | 42 | 75.5 |
| Cafes | 81 | 75.0 |
| Bakeries | 32 | 72.6 |
| Hairdressers | 19 | 68.2 |
Method and limitations
- The sample is every reachable business website audited through ppclift up to October 2026: 2,509 sites, drawn from 192 searches across 33 cities. 168 of those searches were in Australia, and most of the rest in the United States and the United Kingdom. Each website is counted once, however many searches found it.
- Businesses were discovered through OpenStreetMap and Google Places. Each site's home page was fetched once and checked against 15 on-page rules. Sites that did not respond were excluded rather than scored as zero.
- Categories are unevenly represented, because the sample reflects real searches rather than a designed study. Restaurants and dentists together account for most of the sites, and any category with fewer than ten sites has been left out of the per-industry table.
- Industry rows follow the search term as it was entered, so two closely related terms can appear as separate rows rather than being combined after the fact.
- A business with no website can only be matched by name and location, and one source can list a business without its site while another finds it. The no-website figure leaves out any business whose name appeared with a website in another search, so it errs low.
- Until October 2026 these figures counted a site once for every search that found it, which is why the totals are lower now than in earlier versions of this page.
- The checks are on-page only. This study says nothing about page speed, backlinks, domain authority or how any of these sites actually rank.
- No business is identified. Only counts, averages and percentages were extracted, and the figures are a point-in-time snapshot rather than a tracked trend.
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Doing this for a client? These figures came from auditing in bulk. ppclift is SEO lead generation software that audits every local business in a suburb at once, so you can find SEO clients who already need this work. Free plan, no card.