Research · Industries
Who in the GTA
still has no website.
The share of businesses with no website at all varies more by trade than by city. Here is the full ranking across 41 industries in the Greater Toronto Area, built from 49,994 Google and OpenStreetMap listings we checked one by one in August 2026.
Published 2026-09-21 · Formory Group
The short version.
Across all 49,994 listings, 5,158 businesses have no website at all. But that average hides a spread of more than ten to one between trades. Logistics companies (27%), Metal fabricators (22%), Carpenters (18%) are the least likely to have a site. Therapists (2%), Dentists (2%), Veterinary clinics (3%) are the most likely.
The pattern is not about how busy or how profitable a trade is. It follows how customers choose. Where the buyer compares options before calling — a dentist, a vet, a physiotherapist — nearly everyone has a site because the ones without one stopped being chosen. Where the work arrives by referral or through a general contractor, a large share never built one.
The full ranking.
Every industry with at least 300 listings in our survey. "No website" means the listing links to nothing and we could not find a site for the business. Sites that exist but are broken, parked or empty are counted separately in the full report.
Source: Formory Group survey of 49,994 GTA business listings, August 2026. "No mobile layout" is the share of businesses that do have a site whose site has no mobile layout. Free to cite with a link to this page.
Why the trades at the top are offline.
Logistics companies, metal fabricators and carpenters share one thing: a lot of their work is sold to other businesses or comes through someone else. A general contractor hires the metal fabricators; the homeowner never searches for them. For those firms the phone number on a truck and a handful of repeat clients can carry the business for years.
That stops working the moment they want direct work. A homeowner who searches for the trade in their town gets the map pack first, and every business in it with a website has an extra chance to be picked. The median metal fabricator in our survey has 5 Google reviews — few enough that one competitor with a clear site and a dozen more reviews takes the call.
Why the trades at the bottom are not.
Therapists, dentists and veterinary clinics sit at the other end. The customer is choosing someone they will trust with their health, their family or their animal, often for years, and they read before they call. A practice with no site simply does not make the shortlist.
In these trades the question is no longer whether you have a site but whether it holds up. 116 of the 473 veterinary clinics with a website in our survey run one that is visibly out of date — an old copyright line, no HTTPS, or markup from another decade — and the median veterinary clinic competes against rivals with 221 Google reviews. Having a site is table stakes; having one that looks maintained is where the difference is.
What this means if you are in the top half.
It means that in your trade roughly one competitor in 8 has no website at all. That is an opportunity, not a reason to worry. A single honest page — what you do, where, a few photographs of real jobs, a phone number and a form — puts you ahead of every competitor who has nothing.
If you are unsure whether it would pay for itself, we wrote a separate guide on when a Google listing is enough on its own. For some of the trades above it genuinely is.
How we counted.
We collected 49,994 listings from Google Places and OpenStreetMap across 26 GTA municipalities and requested every website attached to them. A business counts as "no website" only when its Google listing has no website on it. Listings that exist only in OpenStreetMap, where we could not confirm the absence of a site, are left out of that count but stay in the total — so every percentage above is a floor, not an estimate. The real share is, if anything, higher.
We re-ran part of the check by hand in September 2026 and removed one category of result we could not stand behind: pages that looked blank to an automated request but render normally in a browser. They are counted as having a website.
Questions
Asked often.
Can I use these numbers in an article?
Yes. Cite Formory Group and link to this page or to the full GTA report. If you need a cut we have not published — one trade in one city, say — ask and we will send it.
Does "no website" include businesses with only a Facebook page?
Yes. A social profile is not counted as a website, because it cannot rank for a service search on its own and the business does not control it.
Why does the ranking differ from the city pages?
It does not contradict them — it cuts the same data by trade instead of by municipality. Trade explains far more of the difference than location does.
Now check your own
You have read the numbers.
Where does your site stand?
Type your address and we will open your site the way a visitor would, then tell you plainly what is wrong with it — including when the answer is nothing. Ten seconds, no email, nothing stored.
If you want
one built.
We build the site, you look at it, and you pay once it is finished and you are happy with it. Hosting, edits and the Google listing carry on monthly, cancellable any month.