I am the online visibility guy. That means my week looks a little strange. I pull up real businesses in real towns and check one thing: could a stranger who has never driven past your building actually find you? Not whether you do good work. Whether you can be found at all.
The scan file just crossed 8,771 businesses across 96 cities. Cleburne, Burleson, Fort Worth, Garland, Irving, Arlington, and up north through Chicago, Berwyn, Cicero and Joliet. Every number below came out of that file this morning. Nothing here is an estimate.
Eight in ten have no website. Not a bad one. None.
- 7,283 of 8,771 businesses (83%) have no website at all.
- 888 (10%) have a social page and nothing else.
- That leaves 600 businesses, under 7% of the whole file, with an actual site they own.
Read that last line again. Out of 8,771 working businesses, fewer than seven hundred own the place customers land when they go looking.
These are not bad businesses
This is the part that gets me every time. The average Google rating across the 8,094 rated businesses in the file is 4.51 stars. In Fort Worth, 233 of the 263 businesses we scanned have no website, and that group averages 4.64 stars. In Cleburne it is 144 of 172. In Chicago, 149 of 172. In Joliet, 132 of 151.
The trades that disappear the hardest
- Transmission shops: 435 of 475 invisible (92%)
- Auto repair shops: 935 of 1,035 (90%)
- Auto body shops: 566 of 628 (90%)
- Concrete contractors: 299 of 331 (90%)
- Electricians: 371 of 418 (89%)
Barbers and salons do better, and it is not close. Barber shops sit at 65% invisible, beauty salons at 68%. Why? Because the chair business lives on Instagram and Facebook, so somebody in that shop is already used to posting. The trades never built that habit, and it costs them.
The phone number tells on you
We check the line type on every number in the file. Here is the split:
- Mobile: 5,234 (nearly 6 in 10)
- VoIP of some flavor: 2,566 (29%)
- Actual landline: 932 (11%)
No judgment on running the business off your cell. Half the good ones do. But understand what it signals. A cell number is a person. A person can leave, change carriers, or lose the phone at a job site, and every listing, every card, every truck door goes stale at once. Nothing you own is holding that number in place.
Thin reviews are more common than you think
677 businesses in the file have zero reviews. Another 2,576 sit somewhere between one and nine. Add it up and 3,253 businesses, 37% of the file, have fewer than ten reviews. Ten. That is one month of asking, and most owners never ask once.
Who actually looks when we show them
When we scan a business, we often build the site anyway and send it over, plus a scorecard showing exactly what a customer sees. Those pages are tracked, so I know who opens them.
- 312 owners have opened their prebuilt site, 802 total opens.
- 102 have opened their scorecard, 223 total opens.
The repeat opens are the interesting part. Nobody opens a page about their own business three times out of politeness. They open it three times because something on it bothered them. That is usually the week they call.
What we do with all this
This is why Bad Habit Design is not just a site builder. We watch the scan data, we make the calls, we sit in the real conversations with owners in Burleson and Cicero, and then we fix the specific thing that is costing them. Sometimes that is a website. Plenty of times it is a free Google listing that has been sitting unclaimed for four years, or a set of hours from 2019, or nine reviews that should be ninety.
You do not need all of it at once. You need somebody who can tell you which one is bleeding.
Want to see where your business lands in this data? Get your free scan at badhabit.design. Takes a minute, costs nothing, and you will know exactly what a stranger sees when they look you up.