Tony Wang5 min readWe Said American Businesses Were the Most Online. Then Our Dataset Grew 6x.
At 12.4M Google Business listings the US led website coverage at 61.0%. At 76M listings across six countries, Canada (70.8%) and Germany (67.6%) beat it.
Most "state of local business" content publishes one number and moves on. We'd rather show you what happened when we didn't: a finding we published in good faith stopped being true four weeks later, for a reason that had nothing to do with the real world changing.
In June 2026 we pulled 12.4 million Google Business Profile listings — mostly US, UK, and Canada — to look at how many local businesses have a real website. The headline was clean: the US led at 61.0% website coverage, ahead of the UK and Canada. In July, the same underlying dataset grew to 76.0 million listings across six countries (adding Germany, Japan, and China), and we re-ran the numbers before reusing the old copy anywhere. The US ranking didn't hold.
What the June number actually said
the June-pass leader of the three
beats the US once weighted fairly
At 12.4 million rows, with the US, UK, and Canada making up essentially the whole dataset, "the US is the most-online market we can measure" was a defensible sentence. It just wasn't the sentence to keep saying past the point where the sample stopped being three countries.
Then the dataset grew 6x, and three more countries came into view
Two things are true at once here, and they're easy to mix up if you only remember the headline number:
- Canada's 70.8% and Germany's 67.6% are both real, current figures — not artifacts of adding more countries to the denominator. They come from directly querying each market's own listings.
- The June pull simply didn't have enough Canadian and (zero) German data at scale to surface this ranking with confidence. Three markets, overwhelmingly US-weighted, is a different measurement instrument than six.
China is the extreme illustration of why country mix matters this much: 5.0% website coverage, against 56-71% everywhere else in the comparison. Any global aggregate that quietly includes or excludes China moves by a wide margin — not because Chinese businesses changed, but because the local-search ecosystem there routes discovery and contact through different channels (WeChat, Alipay mini-programs, Meituan/Dianping listings) instead of an independent business website.
The actual lesson
We're not correcting a mistake in the arithmetic — both the June and July numbers were computed correctly from the data available at the time. We're flagging a mistake in the sentence: "American businesses are the most online" was implicitly a claim about the world, when it was really only ever a claim about a US-UK-Canada-heavy sample. The moment the sample's composition changed, the world-claim broke, even though nothing in the world did.
This is the same failure mode that shows up in far more consequential places — a national survey whose respondent pool skews one way, a platform's "average user" stat computed only over whoever happened to be discoverable. The fix isn't more precision on a fixed sample; it's checking, every time a dataset's composition changes, whether last quarter's ranking still holds before you repeat it.
Query 76 million Google Business Profile listings yourself
Website coverage, category, star rating, review count, and geography — pulled live via Crawlora's Google Maps dataset API. Check any country-level claim against the current sample before you repeat it.
Frequently asked questions
Are American businesses the most online?
Not anymore, once you compare fairly. At 12.4M Google Business Profile listings (nearly all US/UK/Canada), the US led at 61.0% website coverage. At 76M listings across six countries, Canada (70.8%) and Germany (67.6%) both rank higher — the US isn't even the top of the original three markets once the comparison is done at global scale.
Why did the ranking change?
Not because American businesses changed. The dataset's country composition changed — US+UK+Canada were about 98% of the 12.4M-row pull and are about 33% of the 76M-row one. A 'which country is most online' claim is only ever true of the sample it was measured on.
Which country has the lowest website coverage in Google Business Profile?
China, by a wide margin — about 5.0% of listings have a website, versus 56-71% in the US, UK, Canada, Germany, and Japan. Local discovery in China routes through WeChat, Alipay mini-programs, and Meituan/Dianping listings more than independent business websites.
How was this measured?
Via Crawlora's public Google Maps dataset API (datasets_google_map_search/_facets), comparing a 12.4M-listing pull from June 2026 against a 76M-listing pull from July 2026 across six countries: US, UK, Canada, Germany, Japan, and China.