Phone, website, address: how complete is a typical business listing?
Before you can check a business, you need something to check. We measured how many listings carry a phone number, a website, both, or neither.
Every check you can run on a business starts with a detail: a phone number to call, a website to visit, an address to look up. So a basic question matters more than it seems. How many business listings actually include those details?
Across the 7,704,726 listings listed on CheckThisBiz, 94% include a phone number and 79% include a website of the business's own. 77% have both, and 3.4% have neither.
- Phone and website 77% (5,909,671)
- Phone only 17% (1,345,450)
- Website only 2.4% (186,299)
- Neither 3.4% (263,306)
Limiting the count to listings marked open changes the picture only slightly: among open listings, 79% have both a phone and a website, and 2.5% have neither.
Which kinds of business are easiest to check
By group, listings are most likely to carry both a phone and a website in Health Care (88%) and least likely in Hotels & Lodging (64%).
| Group | Both |
|---|---|
| 88% | |
| 84% | |
| 83% | |
| 76% | |
| 71% | |
| 71% | |
| 70% | |
| 68% | |
| 67% | |
| 64% |
Complete enough to vouch for
CheckThisBiz sets a higher bar before it treats a listing as a complete profile: the listing must be marked open, the source data must be confident about it, it must have a phone number and a street address, and it must have either a website or confirmation from more than one source. 4,440,983 listings, or 58%, meet that standard today.
The share varies by state, from 63% in Massachusetts to 48% in Mississippi. Those differences can say as much about the data as about the businesses: how thoroughly each area's businesses have been recorded, and with how much detail.
| State | Share |
|---|---|
| 63% | |
| 62% | |
| 62% | |
| 62% | |
| 62% | |
| 61% | |
| 61% | |
| 60% | |
| 60% | |
| 60% | |
| 60% | |
| 60% | |
| 60% | |
| 59% | |
| 59% |
What to do with an incomplete listing
A thin listing is a reason to look a little harder, not a reason to assume the worst. A genuine business may simply not have updated its details in a while. A few simple steps help:
- Look for the same name, phone and address in more than one independent place. Agreement between sources is a good sign.
- If there is a website, check how long its domain has been registered. Our guide What a domain's age can and can't tell you explains how to read it.
- Call the number from the listing, not only the one in an ad or text message.
- Use CheckThisBiz, which pulls these signals together; its methodology explains each check.
And if you own a business, the fix is in your hands: claim your listing and fill in the missing details. Our guide on making your listings consistent covers the rest.
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