- Digital Royalty study finds 33% of 6,266 owner-claimed Google listings across 12 UK towns and cities had no working website
- Health and beauty fared worst at 53%, and large cities interestingly did worse than small towns
- Follow-up data shows 18.9% of working sites with a readable footer year still display 2024 or earlier
Roughly a third of UK businesses that have claimed their Google listing are sending would-be customers somewhere other than a website they control, and a fair share of the sites that do load look as though nobody has touched them in a while.
The findings come from a recent census of Google Business Profile listings published by Digital Royalty, which checked 8,426 open listings across 12 UK towns and cities and 12 everyday business types, from plumbers and electricians to hair salons and accountants.
Of the 6,266 listings their owners had claimed, 2,095, or 33%, had no working website.
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The inactive group covers four situations: no website on the listing at all, a link only to a social profile, a link only to a page on someone else’s platform such as a booking or food-ordering app, and a site that is dead or parked.
Including unclaimed listings, the figure rises to 44%, though that also includes stale and spam entries that nobody maintains.
Health and beauty was the worst-performing group by some distance, with 53% of its 1,074 claimed listings lacking a working site, led by hair salons (54%) and beauty salons (53%).
Much of that traffic goes to Instagram profiles and booking apps instead: 12% of all health and beauty listings pointed only to a social or booking page, compared with 1%-5% in the other groups.
Trades came next at 35%, with plumbers (41%) and electricians (38%) showing up as the worst offenders, followed by hospitality (29%), retail (26%), and professional services (19%), where real estate agencies (17%) and accountants (21%) were the most likely to have a working site.
Somewhat surprisingly, bigger places fared worse. Large cities posted a 37% rate, compared with 25% in small towns, with Birmingham the highest of the 12 places at 42%. Each region is represented by a single place, however, so region and town size are tangled together, and Digital Royalty itself cautions against reading the results as a regional ranking.
Then there are the sites that used to work: Of the 5,533 listings showing a website link, 495 (8.9%), or roughly one in 11, led to a dead or parked site, while another 353 (6.4%) pointed only to a social or third-party page. Among sites that did load, 5.3% did not load over HTTPS, and 3.3% lacked a mobile viewport tag.
Digital Royalty concluded that “the bigger gap is the missing site, not a poor one,” though HTTPS and a viewport tag are low bars that most modern website builders clear by default, so passing them says little about whether what is on the page is still accurate.
For scale, the government’s latest business population estimates, published on November 5 2026, counted 5.59 million private sector businesses in the UK at the start of 2026. Of these, 5.54 million are small businesses with fewer than 50 employees, but only 1.47 million have any employees at all. The other 4.1 million are run by their owners alone, making them effectively single-person businesses.
The census was not designed to be scaled up, so any national figure carries significant caveats. If the one-in-three rate holds across the UK’s 1.47 million employers, that would mean roughly 490,000 businesses whose Google listing leads nowhere they control.
Applying the same rate to all 5.54 million small businesses would produce about 1.85 million, but doing that could stretch the data available to us too far, since many one-person operations never set up a Google listing in the first place.
The government’s own UK Business Data Survey, published in June and based on responses from 4,450 businesses between October 2025 and January 2026, offers a useful cross-check. It found that 78% of UK businesses say they have a website, up from 68% in 2023 to 2024, with ownership ranging from 92% among small businesses to 84% among micro businesses and 76% among sole traders. Applied to the 5.59 million total, the 22% without one works out to roughly 1.2 million businesses.
To gauge whether working sites are being kept current, Digital Royalty shared follow-up data with TechRadar Pro, noting that on November 5 2026, the company fetched the homepage of each of the 4,592 sites it had counted as working and looked for a copyright year it could read.
Of the 1,944 sites that displayed one, 1,437 (74%) showed 2026 and 140 (7%) showed 2025. The remaining 367, or 18.9%, showed 2024 or earlier, and 114 (5.9%) still displayed 2019 or earlier. Hospitality had the highest share of stale footers at 21.6%, closely followed by professional services (21.2%), health and beauty (20.9%), and trades (19.1%). Retail was the clear outlier at 8.8%.
In all fairness, a copyright year is a blunt instrument; Many website builders and WordPress themes automatically generate the current year, so a 2026 footer does not prove that anyone has updated the page, and a stale footer can sit beneath perfectly current opening hours. The most it reliably shows is that nobody has edited the bottom of the page in a while.
The sample also thins out: Only 42% of the working sites displayed a readable year: 1,354 had no year at all, and 1,294 returned no page to read on the second pass. That gap in data could also interestingly reflect bot protection, since the original census counted sites that blocked its checks as working, pages that only render with JavaScript, or sites that stopped working in the month between the two checks (Digital Royalty’s original census and its communication with TechRadar Pro).
At the same time, it is important to note that a dead or parked domain is not just lost business, either. A parked page can mean an owner still holds a name and never built anything on it, but it can also mean the name lapsed and has since changed hands, in which case the Google listing keeps sending customers to whoever bought it.
There is a thriving market for exactly that. Infoblox Threat Intel counted roughly 65,000 expired domains re-registered every day in the first half of 2026, close to a fifth of all new registrations, and estimated, by extrapolation, that one operation had spent more than $7 million acquiring expired names for their inherited traffic.
As Renée Burton, vice president of Infoblox Threat Intel, put it, expired domains can offer “a shortcut to both trust and traffic.” The census does not say how many of its 495 dead or parked sites have changed owners.
The UK Business Data Survey linked above also hints at why sites drift: When asked who manages their website, 29% of businesses said they use a mix of in-house and external help; 27% do it entirely in-house; 24% rely entirely on an external developer or platform; and 17% manage it in-house through a platform provider.
Sole traders were the most likely to go it alone. The report’s authors suggest the variation by size and sector may reflect “differences in how businesses engage with and maintain their online presence once established.”
A site run entirely by someone else stays current only as long as that relationship does, and a domain renews only as long as the card on file keeps working. For owners, the first check costs nothing: open the website field on your Google Business Profile and tap it on a phone, as a customer would.
Turning on domain auto-renewal closes off the lapsed-domain risk, and for anyone starting from scratch or moving off an abandoned site, our guides to the best small business website builders and best web hosting are a reasonable place to begin.
For a third of the claimed listings in this sample, though, the problem is not a slow or dated website; It is that there is no website at the end of the link.
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