How Many Local Businesses Have No Website? We Measured It

31.1%. Out of 285,554 local businesses we checked across 98 cities and 22 countries, 88,673 have an active Google listing and no website at all.

That number is measured, not surveyed. We did not ask business owners whether they have a website — we looked. Every other figure in circulation comes from asking, and most of them come from asking in 2019.

Search for how many small businesses lack a website and you will get four different answers on one page of results: 17%, 27%, 28%, 40%. They disagree because they are not measurements. They are surveys, and mostly the same survey.

The origin is a Clutch survey from 2019 of 529 US small business owners. It is honest, well-documented research — and it is seven years old, US-only, and self-reported. Nearly every "2026 statistics" page you will find is quoting it, or quoting something that quotes it.

The page that ranks first for this question is Wix's roundup of 50+ statistics. Its headline figure — 27% — is attributed to Zippia, a careers website, reporting 2023 self-reported data. Wix ran no study of its own.

Meanwhile the tools selling these leads publish estimates and label them as such. One competitor's industry table has a column header that reads, literally, "Est. % Without Website". Another states that 60% of specialty contractors have no website, with no citation attached.

Mantis maintains a live index of local businesses built from Google Maps and related public sources. For each business we record whether a website is present on its listing, and we re-check as the index refreshes.

So this is a census of what we have indexed, not a random sample of all businesses on earth. That distinction matters and we will come back to it in the limitations.

The single global figure hides the only thing that actually matters to an agency: where you are.

Read live from the index each time this page is built. Countries under 500 checked businesses are not shown; smaller samples here are concentrated in a handful of cities and should be read as directional.

India sits at 41.2% against the UK's 17.0% — roughly double, on the same measurement. For an agency in Gurugram or Surat that means a large share of the businesses on the map are valid prospects for a first website. In a better-served market the same list is mostly redesign work, which is a different pitch, a different price and a different competitor.

This is the practical reason a single global figure is unhelpful. The widely-quoted 27% comes from US self-reported survey data, and what we measure ranges from 17.0% to 41.2% depending on nothing but where you point it.

Rate matters more than volume here. A category with 50,000 businesses and a 12% gap is a worse hunting ground than one with 2,000 businesses and a 67% gap, because you spend the same effort per lead either way.

Minimum 600 businesses checked per category. Generic catch-all categories excluded.

Open any "best web design niches" listicle and dental practices will be near the top. It is on every one of them. It is the second item on the list published by the closest competitor to this product.

In our index, dentists have the second-lowest no-website rate of any category we track — 10.8%. Nine out of ten already have a site.

That does not make dentists a bad niche. It makes them a bad *first-website* niche. Dentists have money and they buy marketing — but you will be selling a redesign into an existing relationship, competing with whoever built the current site. That is a different, slower sale than walking into a hardware store that has never had a website.

The listicles are recommending verticals by ability to pay, and never checking whether the gap exists. Both halves matter.

Stating the limits is the difference between a number people cite and a number people distrust, so here they are.

Three things follow from the numbers above, and none of them is "buy a list".

Pick the geography before the vertical. A 18.1% gap and a 41.2% gap are different businesses, not different territories. Your entire pitch changes.

Check the gap before you commit to a niche. The published niche lists are ranked by ticket size. Rank yours by ticket size and gap rate together, or you will spend a quarter pitching people who already bought.

Quote a number you can defend. If you are opening a call with "most businesses like yours don't have a website", the owner knows their street better than you do. "Two in five businesses in this area have no site" survives the follow-up question.

These figures are free to quote with attribution to Mantis, linking to this page. We will refresh them on this URL rather than publishing a new one each year, so a link here does not rot.

If you want a cut we have not published — a specific city, a specific category — ask and we will run it.