I read 448 small business websites. A third show no sign of a customer.

For about three weeks I've been emailing small service businesses about a free tool I made. That left me with a list of roughly 500 of their websites: plumbers, cleaners, photographers, accountants, dog groomers and a lot of others, spread over twelve Midwest states. Most have fewer than 150 Google reviews.

On October 6 I ran a script over every home page and counted what each one does with its customers' words. 448 pages loaded. Fifty wouldn't load for a script, and I'd guess some of those were on purpose.

The short version

• 141 of 448 home pages show no sign of a customer.
• 105 link to their Google listing or review box.
• 64 of the 205 footers that print a year show an old one.
• 154 have no phone number you can tap.

A third of them show nothing

141 of the 448 home pages have no trace of a customer on them. No quote and no link to a reviews page. No review widget either. The words "review" and "testimonial" don't appear once.

I expected that number to be smaller. These aren't abandoned sites. 441 of them are on https and 429 are built to fit a phone. Somebody paid for each one and somebody keeps it running. The customers just never made it onto the page.

Most mention reviews, and far fewer show one

266 home pages, about six in ten, mention reviews or testimonials somewhere. That sounds healthy until you look at what the mention is. Often it's a menu item, or one line telling you to go read them on Google.

140 link to a reviews page of their own. 98 put something that looks like a real quote on the home page, and 55 load a review widget I could recognize.

Hardly anyone makes it easy to leave one

This is the count I keep coming back to. 105 of the 448 link to their Google listing or to the review box. That's under a quarter.

Of the 307 sites that show reviews in any form, 82 also give a visitor a way to leave one. The other 225 are displaying something they've left no door open to add to.

And 23 sites do the reverse. They link to the review box and show no reviews anywhere. I like those 23. They're asking.

Three in ten footers are behind

205 home pages print a copyright year. 141 say 2026. The other 64 say something older, and 34 of those say 2023 or earlier.

I know it's a small thing, and I'd bet nearly all of those businesses are doing fine. But when I land on a site with 2022 in the footer I wonder if anyone's still answering the phone, the same way I do when the newest testimonial is three years old.

Thirty-two mark up their own stars

32 sites carry aggregate rating markup, the bit of code that asks Google to print gold stars next to the search result. Google stopped showing those for a business's reviews of itself in 2019.

The markup isn't hurting anybody. It also isn't doing what whoever installed it was told it would do.

What they're built on

WordPress runs 170 of the 448. Squarespace has 46, Wix 41 and GoDaddy's builder 26. I couldn't tell for 151.

A third of the home pages, 154 of them, have no phone number you can tap. The number is usually printed there. It just isn't a link, so on a phone you end up copying it by hand.

How I counted, and where this is weak

• The list isn't a random sample. It's businesses I had already looked at while working out who to email, so it leans toward ones with their own domain, and toward Illinois and the states around it.
• I read one page per business, the home page, as the server sends it. If a site draws its reviews in with a script from a vendor I didn't recognize, I counted it as showing nothing.
• This is pattern matching. "Looks like a real quote" means quotation marks around sixty or more characters, or a block quote. Some of those will be slogans.
• I kept the counts and nothing else. No business is named here or anywhere.

The script is short. If you want to run it on your own town, ask me for it.

What I'd do if one of these sites were mine

Two things, and both are free.

Put one real sentence from a customer on the home page, with their first name and the month they said it. If you're not sure where it should sit, I wrote about that.

Then put a link to your Google review box somewhere a happy customer will trip over it. I built a page that makes that link and a QR code to go with it. There's no account to create.

Exalted, the thing I sell, does the first of those for $9 a month. The second you can do this afternoon without me.