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A new survey of more than 1,000 US small business owners found that 84% are confident customers can find them online. In the same survey, only 41% said they keep an active website. That’s not confidence. That’s a guy telling you his car runs great while it sits on blocks in the yard.
I’m not dunking on anybody here. I get it. You opened a Google Business Profile in 2021, someone built you a website once, and in your head both of those things are still out there working. The problem is the internet doesn’t care what you set up. It cares what you kept up.
The short version
It found a big gap between how visible owners think they are and how much they actually do to stay visible. BrightLocal’s Small Business Marketing Report, released October 22, surveyed over 1,000 US small business owners alongside consumer search data.
The numbers that jumped out at me: 85% own a Google Business Profile, 35% keep it active, and 21% haven’t updated theirs in over three months. Only 41% keep an active website. And 47% of small businesses have fewer than 20 Google reviews, which happens to be the exact line where 47% of consumers say they won’t use a business at all.
Meanwhile, 71% of consumers use Google during local searches and 61% start there. So the place most customers look first is the place a lot of owners quietly stopped watering. (BrightLocal sells local SEO software, so yes, they’d like you to worry about this. The math still checks out.)
Because you search for yourself by name, and of course you show up. Your mom can find you too. That’s not the test.
The real test is a stranger typing “plumber near me” or asking ChatGPT “who does good brakes in Palm Coast” at 9pm. That person doesn’t know your name. They’re picking from whoever looks open, current and trusted right now. A profile with photos from three Christmases ago and a website that still says “coming soon” on the services page loses that round every single time, and nobody calls to tell you about it.
I see this constantly: the business is great, the reviews they do have are glowing, and the online version of them looks like it’s been abandoned since the last hurricane. It’s not a skill problem. It’s a “nobody owns this job” problem.
Yes, probably more than before. AI tools don’t invent your business out of thin air. They pull from places that already describe you: your website, your Google profile, your reviews, the directories you’re listed on.
Here’s the funny part. In the same survey, 65% of owners said they’re actively working on showing up in AI search, but only 35% keep their Google profile active and 26% stay active on directory sites. That’s like signing up for a marathon and skipping the part where you buy shoes. The AI stuff is built on top of the basics, not instead of them.
If you want the slightly nerdier version, I wrote about how getting recommended by ChatGPT mostly comes down to being clear about what you do and being consistent everywhere you’re listed.
Every week or two is plenty for most small businesses. You’re not running a newsroom. You’re proving to Google, and to the humans scrolling, that the lights are on.
That means a new photo of real work, a quick post about something seasonal, answering the question someone left in the Q&A, and replying to every review, good or bad. Fifteen minutes. If that sounds like a pain in the ass, it’s a lot less painful than losing the job to the guy down the road who posted a picture of a finished deck on Tuesday.
I covered what’s worth posting in more detail in this piece on Google Business Profile posts, so I won’t repeat the whole sermon.
Start with whichever one is most embarrassing. Usually that’s the website.
Make sure it loads fast on a phone, lists your real services on real pages, shows your hours and service area, and has a phone number people can tap. If your copyright footer says 2019, that’s not a design choice, that’s a confession. Then match your name, address, phone and hours exactly between the site and the Google profile, because mismatched info confuses people and robots equally.
Next, reviews. In the survey, businesses that ask for reviews were more likely to land in the 11 to 50 review range than those that don’t. Shocking, I know. Asking works. Send the link right after the job, while they still like you, and reply to every one so the next person sees a business that gives a damn.
Last, put somebody’s name on the job. Yours, your office manager’s, or someone you hire. Half-assed visibility almost always traces back to “I thought someone else was handling that.”
It’s not magic, but it’s a real threshold for a lot of shoppers. In this survey, 47% of consumers said they won’t use a business with fewer than 20 reviews, so getting past it is worth a little effort.
Yes. Your profile is a listing you rent from Google, and your website is the one place you control the whole story. AI tools and Google both use the site to confirm what the profile says, so a weak or missing site drags the profile down with it.
Ask a few tools the same question a customer would, like “best roofer in your town,” and see who they name. Only 54% of owners in the survey had checked at all, so just looking puts you ahead of half the field.
None of this is glamorous, and that’s sort of the point. The businesses winning local search right now mostly aren’t smarter, they just kept showing up. If your website is the part that’s been sitting on blocks, I build and look after these for small businesses all the time. Tell me what you’ve got and I’ll tell you straight what’s worth fixing first.
The outreach Autobot I run for businesses, learning your voice and talking to the right people every day so more of them find you and reach out.
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