We Checked 5,397 Local Businesses. 84% Have No Website

We checked 5,397 plumbers, electricians, auto repair shops, house cleaners and landscapers within 30 miles of Palm Bay, Florida. For 4,523 of them, about 84 percent, we could not find a real, working website. That is far above the national picture, where a 2025 survey found about 17 percent of small businesses still offline.

How many local businesses have no website?

Our check ran on October 14, 2026. It covered five trades that people search for in a hurry: a leaking pipe, a dead outlet, a car that will not start, a house to clean before guests arrive, a yard that got away from them.

Result of our check	Businesses	Share
No website found anywhere	4,165	77.2%
A real, working website	847	15.7%
A website address that is dead or broken	357	6.6%
Only a listing on a directory site	27	0.5%
Only a social media page	1	0.0%
All businesses checked	5,397	100%

Only 847 businesses, about 16 in every 100, had a site that loads and names the business or its phone number. The rest either have nothing, or have an address that leads to an error page, a parked domain or a directory listing they do not control.

Which trades are missing the most?

Cleaners and landscapers are almost invisible online. Auto repair shops do best, and even there seven in ten had no real site.

Trade	Businesses checked	No real website	Share
House cleaning	1,293	1,159	89.6%
Landscaping	1,670	1,488	89.1%
Electricians	646	552	85.4%
Plumbers	471	396	84.1%
Auto repair	1,317	928	70.5%
All five trades	5,397	4,523	83.8%

The pattern makes sense. Plumbers, electricians and repair shops hold a state license or registration, so they tend to be a little more established. Cleaners and landscapers can start with a truck and a phone, and many never get past word of mouth.

Which cities have the most businesses without a site?

Melbourne and Palm Bay lead simply because they are the biggest towns in the circle. The counts below are businesses with no real website, by the city on their public record.

City	Businesses with no real website
Melbourne	1,079
Palm Bay	1,047
Vero Beach	510
Cocoa	427
Sebastian	248
Merritt Island	241
Rockledge	232
West Melbourne	130
Fellsmere	106
Satellite Beach	82

Smaller towns such as Cocoa Beach, Malabar, Indialantic, Cape Canaveral and Melbourne Beach each had between 40 and 65. A 30-mile circle around Palm Bay reaches into Indian River County, which is why Vero Beach and Sebastian appear.

How does that compare with the rest of the country?

Nationally the gap is much smaller. In a 2025 Clutch survey of 406 US small business owners, 83 percent said they have a website and 17 percent said they do not, up from 64 percent with a site in 2018.

Two things explain the difference. Surveys ask owners of all kinds of businesses, including shops and offices that live online. We looked at five hands-on trades, where the work happens in someone’s driveway or kitchen. And a survey counts the owner’s answer, while we counted only a site we could actually find and load.

What does a customer see when there is no website?

Picture someone in Palm Bay at nine at night with water under the sink. They type “plumber near me” on a phone. Google builds its results from the mobile version of each site. Its own documentation says it uses the mobile version of a site’s content for indexing and ranking.

A business with no site has nothing for Google to index. It may still show on the map if someone claimed a listing, but the customer cannot read what the business does, see its hours, check its service area, or send a message. A business with a dead site is worse off: the customer taps the link, gets an error, and assumes the company closed.

The customer does not call the best plumber that night. They call the one they could see.

What can a small business do about it?

You do not need a big site. You need a fast one that answers five questions on a phone: what you do, where you work, how to reach you, what others can expect, and why you. One page done well beats ten pages done badly.

Ask who holds your domain name and what it takes to move it, and get the answer in writing. Make sure the site loads in a couple of seconds on a weak signal. Put your business name, service area and contact details in the same words everywhere: the site, the map listing, the truck. If you serve Spanish-speaking customers, say so, in Spanish.

This is exactly the work we do in our website creation service. We build the site, host it and keep it updated. Your content stays yours, and our agreement says in writing who owns the domain: one you already own stays yours, and one we register for you can be bought from us for the transfer fee.

How we got these numbers

Master AI Labs ran this check with its own software. We publish the method so anyone can judge it, and so we can repeat it every quarter.

• Sources. Florida public records: DBPR license extracts for electricians and plumbers in Brevard and Indian River counties, FDACS motor vehicle repair registrations, and Sunbiz corporate and fictitious-name filings. Plus the open Foursquare OS Places dataset, release of February 6, 2025. Nothing was scraped from Google.
• Area. Every record was placed on a map with the US Census Geocoder and kept only if it sits within 30 miles of central Palm Bay. Records that could not be placed exactly used their city center.
• Matching. The same business can appear in several sources. We merged duplicates by name, address and phone, which turned 6,444 records into 5,397 unique businesses. We excluded records marked inactive.
• The website check. For each business we tried any web address found in the sources, then a handful of obvious domain guesses built from the business name. We fetched each candidate politely, no more than one request per second per site. A result counted as real only when the page loaded and named the business or its phone number. Dead means an address that no longer loads or shows a parked page. Directory-only and social-only mean the only page we found belongs to a listings site or a social network.
• Run date. October 14 and 15, 2026.

Caveats, stated plainly. A business can have a site under a domain we could not guess, so the true number without a site is somewhat lower than 84 percent. The Foursquare release is from early 2025, so a few of those businesses may have closed or changed their site since. Trade for Sunbiz-only records was read from the business name, so a few may be in the wrong trade. Cleaners and landscapers have no state license roster, so their counts lean on Foursquare and Sunbiz names and are likely an undercount of the whole trade.

If your business is in our file and the result is wrong, email us. We fix the record and the next re-check will show it.

Ask for a written quote

If your business is one of the 4,523, the fix is smaller than you think. Tell us what you do and where you work. You get a plain-English written quote and a reply within one business day, in English or Spanish. Ask for a written quote.

Work from home and fighting the Wi-Fi? Read our guide to Wi-Fi dead spots in a Florida block home.