We checked 1,067 well-reviewed local businesses. 25 had a website.
There is a claim everyone in this industry repeats: most Indian small businesses do not have a website. It is always asserted and almost never measured.
So we measured it. Between 12 July and 13 August 2026 we pulled every business Google Maps would return across 32 categories in a single West Delhi pincode — 110059, covering Janakpuri, Uttam Nagar, Vikaspuri and the surrounding blocks.
We ended up with 1,067 businesses. Between them they hold 256,881 Google reviews.
Twenty-five of them had a website.
The headline
| Businesses | Share | |
|---|---|---|
| No website at all | 889 | 83.3% |
| A social or directory link instead | 153 | 14.3% |
| An actual website of their own | 25 | 2.3% |
The middle row deserves attention. Those 153 businesses have filled in the website field on their Google profile — but with something that is not a website. 113 of them point at an Instagram profile. Seventeen point at a Google Sites page, sixteen at Facebook, five at a WhatsApp link, two at Linktree.
So the number of businesses in this pincode with a web page they actually control, that a customer can browse, that Google can index as a site — is twenty-five. Out of one thousand and sixty-seven.
These are not struggling businesses
This is the part that surprised us, and it is the reason we are publishing.
Our sweep applied a minimum rating of 4.0, so every business in this dataset is already doing something right. The numbers bear it out:
- Every business is rated 4.0 or above. 57% are rated 4.8 or higher.
- The lowest review count in the entire set is 29. The median is 116.
- A quarter of them have more than 229 reviews. The top 10% have more than 456.
- The largest has 5,917.
These are established, popular, well-liked local businesses with years of accumulated customer goodwill.
85 of them have more than 500 Google reviews and no website. 34 have more than 1,000.
The most-reviewed business in the entire dataset without a website is a dessert shop with 4,752 reviews at 4.0 stars. Second is a restaurant with 4,734. Then a barbecue place with 3,302, a banquet hall with 3,019, a bakery with 2,759.
These businesses have served tens of thousands of customers. They are the opposite of marginal. And if you search for what they sell rather than for their name, they are invisible.
By category
Categories with at least 12 businesses in the sample:
| Category | n | No website | Social only | Real site | Avg rating | Median reviews |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Books & stationery | 25 | 100% | 0% | 0 | 4.36 | 180 |
| Sports shops | 12 | 100% | 0% | 0 | 4.33 | 163 |
| General stores | 41 | 98% | 2% | 0 | 4.27 | 159 |
| Driving schools | 21 | 95% | 5% | 0 | 4.74 | 190 |
| Optical & eyewear | 16 | 94% | 6% | 0 | 4.88 | 200 |
| Tiles & sanitary | 14 | 93% | 7% | 0 | 4.69 | 120 |
| Auto service | 43 | 91% | 7% | 1 | 4.63 | 140 |
| Restaurants & cafés | 96 | 90% | 9% | 1 | 4.41 | 132 |
| Dental clinics | 81 | 90% | 9% | 1 | 4.86 | 100 |
| Pet stores & aquariums | 31 | 90% | 10% | 0 | 4.70 | 90 |
| Mobile shops | 20 | 90% | 0% | 2 | 4.71 | 149 |
| Events & entertainment | 36 | 89% | 11% | 0 | 4.53 | 136 |
| Coaching & tuition | 55 | 87% | 9% | 2 | 4.87 | 98 |
| Home repair & trades | 75 | 87% | 9% | 3 | 4.80 | 108 |
| Gaming zones | 23 | 83% | 17% | 0 | 4.63 | 172 |
| Furniture & home | 18 | 83% | 17% | 0 | 4.71 | 149 |
| Boutiques & apparel | 86 | 81% | 15% | 3 | 4.68 | 124 |
| Hardware & electronics | 43 | 79% | 16% | 2 | 4.63 | 112 |
| Gyms & fitness | 88 | 76% | 18% | 5 | 4.76 | 98 |
| Photography studios | 33 | 73% | 27% | 0 | 4.75 | 92 |
| Vets | 26 | 69% | 27% | 1 | 4.56 | 98 |
| Salons & spas | 129 | 67% | 33% | 0 | 4.78 | 126 |
| Dance classes | 18 | 56% | 33% | 2 | 4.91 | 85 |
Two patterns fall out of this.
Retail is almost entirely absent from the web. Books and stationery: not one of 25. Sports shops: not one of 12. General stores: one in fifty. These are businesses whose entire stock list is a natural web page, and none of them have one.
The visual and appointment-led categories have gone to Instagram instead. Salons, dance classes, photography studios and vets have the lowest rate of having no web presence at all — but they got there through Instagram, not through websites. A third of salons list an Instagram profile as their website.
That is a rational choice for showing work. It is a poor one for being found: an Instagram profile does not appear when someone searches "hair smoothening price in Janakpuri", and it cannot be organised so a customer can browse services and prices without messaging you.
A website is not what makes them popular
We expected to find that businesses with websites had more reviews. They do not.
| n | Median reviews | Mean reviews | Avg rating | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| No website | 889 | 116 | 243 | 4.65 |
| Social link only | 153 | 113 | 238 | 4.79 |
| Real website | 25 | 126 | 171 | 4.85 |
Essentially flat. The businesses with websites are rated very slightly higher and have marginally more reviews at the median — and actually fewer on average, because the biggest names in the sample are exactly the ones with no site.
We think this is the most honest finding in the study, and it cuts against our own commercial interest, so it is worth stating plainly: in this dataset, having a website is not what made a business successful. These businesses built their reputations on Google Maps, word of mouth and the quality of their work.
What a website changes is not whether you are good. It is whether someone who has not heard of you, searching for what you sell rather than for your name, can find you at all. That is a different question, and this data cannot answer it — it can only show that almost nobody is competing for those searches.
Methodology
Source. Google Places API text search, run across 32 category terms against pincode 110059, between 12 July and 13 August 2026. Deduplicated on Google's place ID.
The rating filter matters. Our sweep specified a minimum rating of 4.0. This dataset is therefore not a census of all businesses in the pincode — it is a census of the well-rated, established ones. Businesses that are new, poorly rated, or have very few reviews are absent by construction. The lowest review count present is 29.
We think this makes the finding stronger rather than weaker, but it is a real limitation and any comparison to a full census would be wrong.
What counts as a website. The websiteUri field on the business's Google Business Profile. We classified it as a social or directory link if it pointed at Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, Linktree, Google Sites, business.site, Justdial, IndiaMART, Zomato, Swiggy or similar. Everything else was counted as a real website — a generous definition, since we did not check whether those 25 sites were live, current, or any good.
Known limitations. One pincode, one city, one point in time. A business may have a website and simply not have added it to its Google profile — though if it is not on the profile, customers searching Maps cannot find it either, which is arguably the same problem. Category assignment is our own classification of Google's place types and business names.
Reuse. These figures are free to cite with a link back to this page. If you want the category-level breakdown in a spreadsheet for research, write to us and we will send it.
What we take from it
The claim that Indian small businesses are not online turns out to be understated, at least here. It is not that most lack a website — it is that 97.7% of well-reviewed, established local businesses in this pincode do not have one, and the largest single group of the remainder have substituted an Instagram profile.
Whether that matters depends entirely on how their customers search. For a general store on a busy road, possibly not much. For a dental clinic with 100 reviews and no page explaining what a root canal costs, or a driving school with 190 reviews that cannot be found by anyone searching for driving lessons in their area — it is a large amount of demand going somewhere else, invisibly.
Apna.live builds websites for local businesses from the Google Business Profile they already have. This research came out of our own lead data — which is why the sample looks the way it does, and why we have described its limits in detail above.
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