Which Local Business Industries Have the Most Businesses With No Website Listed?
A ProspectGrid analysis of 43,914 local-business records found a striking difference between industries: 47.7% of auto repair records had no website listed, compared with 24.1% of roofing contractor records.
A business website is no longer the only way customers discover a local company. Google Business Profiles, social networks, marketplaces, and review platforms can all generate calls and visits. Even so, a missing website remains one of the clearest signals of an incomplete digital presence — and, for agencies and B2B sales teams, a potential prospecting opportunity. That makes local businesses with no website listed a practical starting point for prospect research.
To see where that opportunity is most concentrated, ProspectGrid analyzed Google Places data for five local-service industries across Charlotte, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, and Phoenix. The 25 city-category datasets contained 43,914 category-level business records, representing 42,985 unique Google CIDs after deduplication across the full collection. See the full five-city study →
The result was not evenly distributed. Auto repair stood far above the other industries, while roofing contractors had the smallest website gap in the sample.
Key findings
- Auto repair had the largest website gap at 47.7% of records with no website listed.
- The highest and lowest categories were 23.6 percentage points apart: auto repair at 47.7%, roofing contractors at 24.1%.
- Geography also matters: the same industry can have substantially different website-gap rates from city to city.
Website gap by industry
| Industry | Business records | No website listed | Website gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Auto repair shops | 29,976 | 14,293 | 47.7% |
| Electricians | 3,076 | 999 | 32.5% |
| HVAC contractors | 4,196 | 1,268 | 30.2% |
| Plumbers | 2,680 | 724 | 27.0% |
| Roofing contractors | 3,986 | 962 | 24.1% |
1. Auto repair has by far the largest website gap
Auto repair was the clearest outlier in the study. Of 29,976 auto repair records, 14,293 had no website listed — a gap of 47.7%.
The pattern was not driven by a single city. The no-website rate for auto repair ranged from 34.7% in Charlotte to 55.8% in Philadelphia. Houston, which contained the largest auto repair dataset, had 14,301 records and a 50.9% website gap.
For prospecting teams, this makes auto repair a particularly large pool of potential leads. But the absence of a listed website should not be treated as proof that a business needs a new site. A better qualification process combines the website signal with evidence that the business is active — for example, recent reviews, a meaningful review count, a strong rating, and a working phone number.
2. Electricians and HVAC form the middle tier
Electricians ranked second, with 32.5% of records missing a listed website. HVAC contractors followed at 30.2%.
These two categories were much closer to one another than either was to auto repair. The difference between electricians and HVAC was only 2.3 percentage points, while auto repair sat more than 15 percentage points above electricians.
That matters when deciding which verticals to prioritize. Auto repair offers the largest raw website gap, but electricians and HVAC may still be attractive for agencies because both are high-value local service categories in which a relatively small number of new customers can have substantial commercial value.
3. Plumbers and roofing contractors have smaller — but still substantial — gaps
Among plumbers, 724 of 2,680 records had no website listed, producing a 27.0% gap. Roofing contractors had the lowest rate of the five industries at 24.1%, or 962 of 3,986 records.
“Lowest” is relative: a 24.1% gap still means almost one in four roofing contractor records in the sample had no website listed. For a targeted lead-generation campaign, that remains a sizeable addressable pool.
Even so, auto repair sat 23.6 percentage points above roofing — a record with no website listed was nearly twice as likely in auto repair as in roofing. That spread also shows why broad statements such as “many local businesses do not have websites” are not very actionable — the opportunity varies significantly by vertical, and a campaign that targets one category can produce a very different result from one using the same filters in another.
Location still matters inside each industry
Industry was not the only source of variation. The same category could perform very differently from city to city.
For example, 55.8% of Philadelphia auto repair records had no website listed, compared with 34.7% in Charlotte. Among plumbers, Philadelphia reached 38.5%, while Phoenix was only 19.3%.
This means the most useful prospecting question is not simply “Which industry has the biggest gap?” but rather “Which industry-and-location combination produces the strongest pool of qualified businesses?”
That is also why category and geography are most useful when treated as filters rather than as isolated statistics.
Search local businesses by industry and location with ProspectGrid →
Related research: This article is based on ProspectGrid's broader study, The Local Business Website Gap: 42,985 Businesses Across Five U.S. Cities →
What “no website listed” means
For this analysis, a business was classified as having no website listed when the Website field in the collected Google Places data was empty.
That distinction is important. The study did not independently search the wider web for every business. Some businesses in this group may own a website that is not linked from their Google listing. Others may rely on a Facebook page, marketplace profile, booking platform, or another third-party presence.
So the result should not be interpreted as “47.7% of auto repair shops definitely have no website anywhere.” It means that 47.7% of the auto repair records returned by this collection process had no website listed in the relevant field.
What the data means for lead generation
A missing website is useful as a prospecting signal, not as a complete qualification rule.
For a web designer, SEO consultant, marketing agency, or B2B sales team, the strongest prospects are often businesses that combine a weak digital-presence signal with evidence of real commercial activity. Examples include:
- no website listed, but dozens or hundreds of Google reviews;
- a strong rating and active customer engagement;
- a valid phone number and complete business information;
- a high-value local service where one new customer can justify marketing spend;
- an established business whose online presence appears weaker than its offline reputation.
A repair shop with 150 reviews and no listed website is a very different lead from an unreviewed listing with incomplete contact information. Both technically match the same website filter, but only one may be worth contacting.
The practical use of the website-gap data is therefore prioritization: choose industries and locations where the signal is common, then qualify individual businesses using reviews, ratings, contact information, and other indicators.
Methodology
ProspectGrid collected Google Places business data on October 2–3, 2026, covering five local-service categories in five U.S. cities.
The cities were Charlotte, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, and Phoenix. The categories were auto repair shops, electricians, HVAC contractors, plumbers, and roofing contractors.
Each city-category dataset was deduplicated by Google CID. Across the 25 datasets, this produced 43,914 category-level records. Because the same business could appear in more than one category or dataset, CIDs were also deduplicated across the complete collection, resulting in 42,985 unique businesses.
Across the category-level records, 18,246 had no website listed.
The industry percentages in this article are calculated from the category-level records. Because a business can legitimately appear in more than one category, the industry counts should not be summed and interpreted as 43,914 globally unique companies; the globally deduplicated total is 42,985.
The results describe businesses returned by the collection process and are not a complete census of every business operating inside each city. Search coverage, Google category assignments, service-area businesses, listing quality, and geographic collection boundaries can affect the results.
Conclusion
Among the five local-service industries analyzed, auto repair had the largest website gap by a wide margin. Nearly half of its records — 47.7% — had no website listed. Electricians and HVAC followed at 32.5% and 30.2%, while plumbers and roofing contractors came in at 27.0% and 24.1%.
The main takeaway is not that every business without a listed website is a good prospect. It is that the website gap is highly uneven across industries, which makes category selection an important part of local lead generation.
Start with the categories where the opportunity is concentrated, then use business activity signals to identify the companies most worth contacting.
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