How to find businesses without a website: 5 ways, and what each one costs you
The honest comparison: Google Maps by hand, lead lists, scrapers, driving around, and a map that has already checked. With counts from 3.4 million businesses in 50 U.S. cities.
If you sell websites to local businesses, the first job is finding the ones that don't have one. It sounds easy and it eats more time than the selling. Here are the five ways people do it, what each one really costs, and the numbers we see across Pindrop's map.
- businesses with no website on record, in 50 U.S. cities
- 527,065
- of the 3.4 million local businesses counted there
- 15.5%
- of barbers, the highest of any trade
- 36%
- in El Paso, the highest of the 50 cities
- 25%
1. Google Maps, one listing at a time
Search a trade and a town, open each result, look for the website button. It is free and it works, and it is slow: at roughly 15 seconds a listing, a hundred listings is half an hour, and in most cities only about one in six turns out to have no site. You also re-check the same businesses every time you come back.
2. Buy a lead list
Lead brokers sell spreadsheets of businesses "without websites". Check how the list was made and when. The common problems are age (a list scraped last year includes businesses that have since built a site, or closed) and definition (some count a Facebook page as a website, some don't).
3. Run a scraper
Scraping tools pull listings from Google Maps or Yelp in bulk and flag the ones with an empty website field. Fast, but you pay per result, you inherit the platform's mistakes, and scraping Google Maps breaks its terms. You still have to check each lead before you pitch it.
4. Drive around
Walk a main street and ask. It has the best close rate of anything here, because you are already standing in the shop. It is also the slowest way to find leads, so the people who do this well pick the street in advance.
5. Use a map that has already checked
This is what Pindrop does. The map holds about 43 million local businesses, checked ahead of time, and every business with no website on record shows as a gold pin. Tap one and Pindrop builds the business a website from its own listing, photos and reviews, so you walk in with the finished site instead of a promise.
Where to look first
By share, the trades least likely to have a site across the 50 cities are barbers (36%), auto repair shops and car washes (28%), and beauty salons and spas (27%). By count, restaurants lead with almost 55,000 without a site, though they are harder to close (more on that in the best businesses to sell websites to).
| Kind of business | No website | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Barbers | 8,388 | 36% |
| Auto repair shops | 15,197 | 28% |
| Beauty salons and spas | 24,477 | 27% |
| Nail salons | 4,683 | 20% |
| Restaurants | 54,755 | 18% |
| Hair salons | 8,385 | 18% |
| Cleaning services | 3,557 | 15% |
| Landscapers | 1,413 | 15% |
| Contractors | 5,773 | 13% |
| Plumbers | 766 | 8% |
| Roofers | 825 | 7% |
Trades like plumbing and roofing mostly have a site already. The few that don't stand out, and they tend to be one-truck operations run from a phone.
How to check a lead before you pitch it
- Search the business name and town. Some have a site that never made it onto their listing.
- A Facebook or Instagram page is not a website, and most owners know it. Those are good leads: they already care about being found.
- Look at the reviews. A business with 40 good reviews and no website is a much easier sale than one with none; the site has something to show.
- Check it is open. Recent reviews and posted hours are the quickest tell.
How we counted
- Every business on Pindrop's map within about 12 miles of the center of 50 U.S. cities, U.S. listings only, September 26, 2026: 3,390,107 businesses.
- "No website" means none on record in the map data; a social media page does not count. Churches, schools, parks, government offices and similar places are left out.
- Kinds of business are grouped from each listing's category. Per-city numbers are in the finder and the report.
