We Checked Plumber Listings in Metros
We pulled the businesses Google Maps lists as plumbers in big U.S. metros, in all, and checked which ones link to a website. % don't. Counting the linked websites that no longer load, % of listings lead nowhere a customer can read.
Not every listing is a real shop. We looked up site-less listings by hand: % were real, working plumbers, including shops in business for decades. % looked fake or set up to sell leads, and for % we couldn't tell.
Where plumbers are hardest to find online
| Rank | Metro | Share with no website of their own |
|---|
Fewer reviews, fewer websites
Share of plumber listings with no website of their own, grouped by how many Google reviews the listing has.
Is "no website" really no website?
of the site-less listings we looked up one by one really had no website anywhere. Only turned out to have a site that just wasn't linked on Google.
What the listings turned out to be ( checked in metros)
Embed the ranking
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How we did this
- We picked the metros. large U.S. metros, each measured as the county that contains its main city (all five boroughs for New York City). A metro needed at least plumber listings to be ranked, so is counted in the totals but not ranked.
- We covered the whole map, not just the top results. We searched Google Maps' business data square by square, splitting any square that returned Google's limit of 20 results into smaller squares, until every square came back complete. That caught small shops that a normal search for "plumber" never shows.
- We kept businesses Google files mainly under "plumber" and that Google shows as open. A business filed mainly under something else, like heating and cooling, was left out of the headline figure. Counting it changes the order of the metros very little.
- We checked the website link. A listing counts as "no website of its own" when it links nothing, only a Facebook or directory page, or a free Google site Google has since shut down. For every linked site we loaded the page twice, a minute apart. Only sites that failed both times count as not loading. A site that blocked our checker was counted as working.
- We checked a sample by hand. For listings with no website, we searched for each business by name and phone to see whether a site existed anyway, and whether the listing belonged to a real shop.
What this study can't tell you
- It counts listings on Google Maps, not every plumber in a city. Google shows some plumbers and not others, so this is what a customer searching the map actually sees.
- Some listings aren't real shops. In our hand check, % of site-less listings looked fake or set up to sell leads, and % we couldn't place either way. We kept them in because a customer sees them too, and we report the shares here instead of hiding them.
- Counting only established shops (5 or more reviews), the share drops to %. We show both, and the metro order holds under either.
- No government dataset tracks plumber websites, so there is no outside figure to compare against. We checked Census counts of one-person plumbing businesses by county, and they did not predict which metros ranked high. Census groups plumbers with heating and cooling contractors, so it is a rough comparison at best.
- Google Maps changes every day. These figures are a snapshot from .
See for yourself
Try it on your own city
Open Google Maps, search "plumber" in your county, and open the listings one at a time. Count how many have no Website button, or one that goes to a Facebook page. You won't match our number exactly, because the map changes daily and a regular search shows the more prominent shops first, but you'll see the pattern in a few minutes.
That these are real plumbers. Our headline counts listings, and % of the site-less ones we checked by hand looked fake. If you want to test that, the established-shops figure (%) sets those aside, and the hand-check notes behind the fake-listing share are available on request.
The files we computed from
Each file carries a fingerprint (a SHA-256 code). If you download a Census file and its fingerprint differs, the agency has published a revision since we ran this analysis, so you have a newer file than ours.
The full list of listings behind each metro (Google place IDs plus our findings) is available to journalists on request through Sixth City Marketing. We don't publish it, because it would name individual small businesses.