Contractor Website Statistics: A Census of 939 Google Maps Profiles in Oceanside, Carlsbad, and Vista

Contractor website statistics usually come from surveys. These come from a census. We opened the website of every plumber and electrician profile Google Maps serves a homeowner searching in these three cities, all 939 of them, each on a phone.

One in four had no website linked at all. One in three had no website that worked.

Collected July 15, 2026 · 939 businesses · 186 map coordinates · 1,116 searches · Methodology · Data (CSV)

The count

Two of these numbers required no judgment from us. 237 of 939 profiles, or 25.2%, carried no website link of any kind. Another 74, or 7.9%, linked to a site that failed when we opened it: a dead domain, a parked page, a server error that repeated on recheck. Together that is 311 businesses. 33.1% of the profiles Google Maps offered had no working website behind them.

How the count was built

Google Maps answers according to where you stand. Search "plumber" from the harbor and you get one list; search it again from the mission and you get another. A single check from a single spot says almost nothing about a city, which is the quiet flaw in most local business surveys.

So we didn't search once. We fixed 186 coordinates in a 2-kilometer grid across the three cities and ran the search from every one of them, three ways each: plumber, plumber near me, emergency plumber, and the electrician equivalents. 1,116 searches total. Every one completed.

Deduplication used Google's own place identifier. Names were never compared, so two similar names stay two businesses and one business that surfaces in forty different searches still counts once. A real Chrome browser, set to the screen size of a phone, then opened every linked website and logged what came back.

The rules were locked first

The grid, the queries, the grading rules, and the publication conditions were written and version-controlled before the first search ran. One condition was a stop rule: if more than 20% of businesses could not be graded confidently, no percentage would be published. This run came in at 7.5%. The full protocol ships with the dataset, and the methodology page has the short version.

Plumber and electrician website statistics, city by city

Split the data by city and trade and you get six views of it. They agree. The share of profiles with no working website runs from 28.0% at best to 37.4% at worst.

Inside that consistency, one clean split. Electricians trail plumbers in every single city: 37.4% of Oceanside's electricians have no working website against 32.4% of its plumbers, 36.6% against 31.1% in Carlsbad, and 33.6% against 28.0% in Vista. We don't know why, because the data doesn't say. But it held everywhere we looked.

The stricter cut: 51.8%

The numbers above required no judgment. This one requires ours, so it is labeled.

Beyond the 311 businesses with no working site, another 175 linked to a website that fails RSP's published grading standard: it doesn't fit a phone screen, doesn't load over HTTPS, or shows at least two staleness signals such as a copyright line three or more years old. Add those and 486 of 939, or 51.8%, fail. That figure depends on where we drew the "outdated" line. The rules are published, and anyone can re-draw the line with the data and see what moves. If you quote one number from this page, quote 33.1%.

The failed pilot

Our first attempt started from the state contractor license register and tried to find each license holder's website. It hit 58% ungraded. The stop rule fired and we discarded it.

The autopsy taught us more than the study would have. License names are often not the names businesses trade under, and a license register turns out not to be a list of operating businesses at all: it holds dormant licenses and subcontractors who never meet a homeowner. Counting who a customer is actually shown removed the problem that counting license holders could only manage. The failed pilot and its 58% ungraded result are preserved with the research record.

Use the data

The aggregate dataset is a free CSV download: all six city-trade groups, every classification, counts and shares. The methodology page covers the grid, the grading rules, and what was deliberately left out. Reporters and researchers who want more can request the full package: the pre-registered protocol, the per-search log, and the coordinates to re-run the whole study. No business is named in any of it.

Media kit

Charts and graphics are free to reuse with attribution (CC BY 4.0).

Headline graphic (1200×630 PNG) Classification chart (PNG) City & trade comparison (PNG) Methodology map (PNG)

If you're a contractor in one of these cities, one in three of your competitors on the map has no working website behind their listing. Whether you're one of them takes about a minute to check. A free Lead Leak Map shows you what a searching homeowner actually sees.