One in Three Local Business Websites Is Broken. Yours Is Where the AI Sends People to Check. 

On 20 October, a study called The State of the Small Business Web loaded the websites of 2,629 established local businesses across eight cities in four countries. Each one was opened in a real browser at phone size and inspected for errors, dead links, broken images and mobile problems. About a third had no functional, healthy web presence at all.

One caveat up front, because it matters: the study is by Looops, which sells website software to small businesses. That is a vendor with an obvious interest in the answer being alarming, and no one has independently replicated the numbers. We are citing it because the failure modes it lists are specific and checkable on your own site in ten minutes — which is a different thing from asking you to believe the headline.

What was actually broken

• JavaScript errors on load — the single most common fault, on 16.3% of sites.
• Out-of-date copyright years in the footer. Cosmetic, except that it is the fastest signal a visitor has that nobody is minding the business.
• jQuery-era technology, broken images, and pages that are not mobile responsive.
• No website at all: 12.5% of businesses in Montreal, 9.2% in Los Angeles, 8.5% in New York.

The city pattern is interesting. London had very few missing websites but the highest defect rate of anywhere, at 39.7% — so having a site and having a working site are separate problems. Los Angeles came out worst overall at 42.4% bad or missing; Chicago best at 31.9%. By trade, photographers (30.9%) and hair salons (30.2%) had the highest share of bad or missing sites.

What's happening in the world

This would be a mildly embarrassing statistic in isolation. What makes it expensive is what has changed around it.

AI assistants have become a real discovery channel — BrightLocal puts the share of consumers who have used AI to find or get a recommendation for a local business at 58%, and eMarketer reports 31% now use it monthly. But almost nobody acts on the recommendation directly. In BrightLocal's survey of 673 people who found a local business through AI, 75% went and checked Google or Google Maps before making contact.

That is the detail everyone selling AI visibility skips. The assistant is not the destination. It is the introduction. The customer hears your name, then goes looking for corroboration — your profile, your reviews, your website — and decides there. Google is still the first channel for 52% of local searches; it is now also the verification step for the ones that started somewhere else.

So the funnel has quietly grown a new stage. It used to be: search, see, click, contact. It is now: ask, hear a name, verify, contact. Every piece of work we have written about on this site — reviews, listings, structured content, third-party mentions — gets you through the first two stages. The third stage is your website on a phone, and a third of businesses are losing people there, after the AI has already done its job.

It is worth being blunt about the implication for anyone, us included, who sells AI visibility: getting recommended by an assistant and then sending that person to a page with a 2019 copyright line and a layout that does not fit their screen is money spent to make a worse impression faster.

How you can use this for your business

• Open your own site on your phone, on mobile data, not office Wi-Fi. This single act catches most of what the study counted. You are looking at it the way a customer who just heard your name from ChatGPT will.
• Check the footer year. If it does not say 2026, fix it today. It is thirty seconds of work and it is the clearest visible signal that a business has been abandoned.
• Look for anything that does not appear — missing images, a map that will not load, a form that does nothing. A JavaScript error is invisible to you and fatal to a stranger, because they do not know what was supposed to be there.
• Pinch-test every page. If you have to zoom to read it, it is not mobile responsive, and that is where almost all of this traffic arrives.
• Make your phone number tappable and your address match your Google Business Profile character for character. The verification step is the customer comparing what the AI said, what Google says, and what your site says. Any disagreement is a reason to pick someone else.
• Then do the same on a competitor's site. If theirs is broken and yours is not, that is a genuine advantage in a market where a third of the field is failing a test nobody told them they were taking.

Three quarters of people who find a business through AI go and verify it on Google and its website before contacting anyone, and roughly a third of local business websites fail that check. Being recommended is now the easy half. Open your site on your phone tonight and look at it like someone deciding whether to trust you.