Half of businesses publish no address: what a machine finds when it visits your site
544 websites visited across twelve countries. 278 publish a readable address, 96 do not respond. In Japan, four businesses in five publish none.
544
business websites visited, twelve countries
In this article
51%
publish a readable contact address
19%
in Japan - the most closed country in the set
Before measuring what AI says about a business, you have to be able to identify it. So we did the simplest thing there is: visit its website, read its contact pages, and note whether an email address is published in plain text.
544 businesses, twelve countries, nine trades. No guessing, no “contact@” bolted onto the domain: only what is written on their own pages. The result is sharp, and it splits the world in two.
What a machine finds across 544 sites
| Result | Businesses | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Address published in plain text | 278 | 51% |
| Site reachable, no address | 170 | 31% |
| Site unreachable | 96 | 18% |
Almost one business in five did not respond at all - expired domain, dead hosting, broken redirect. These are companies we had just found in a business directory, with an up-to-date listing. Their door is shut and nobody knows it.
And a country gap we did not expect
| Country | Sites visited | Address published | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Belgium | 29 | 20 | 69% |
| Singapore | 29 | 18 | 62% |
| Switzerland | 46 | 28 | 61% |
| United Arab Emirates | 69 | 39 | 57% |
| United Kingdom | 51 | 28 | 55% |
| Poland | 33 | 18 | 55% |
| Brazil | 75 | 40 | 53% |
| France | 56 | 27 | 48% |
| Saudi Arabia | 35 | 16 | 46% |
| United States | 75 | 34 | 45% |
| Japan | 43 | 8 | 19% |
One Japanese site in five publishes an address. This is not negligence: it is a convention, and it carries a cost nobody chose.
In Japan the contact page is a form. It is an established, courteous convention, and it works perfectly for a human customer. But a form cannot be read: there is nothing to extract, nothing to copy, nothing to confirm. To anything that is not a browser with a person in front of it, the business has no contact details.
Why this concerns us
AI assistants cite what is structured, consistent and confirmed across several sources. An address published on the site, matching the Google profile and the directories, is exactly that kind of confirmation: it ties a name to a real entity.
We are not claiming that publishing an address raises a score - we have not measured that, and it would be a nice story rather than a result. What we observe is more modest and more solid: half of these businesses give a machine no way to confirm them.
What it costs, concretely
- A directory that copies your details cannot: your listing stays incomplete, or wrong.
- An engine checking that two mentions of your name refer to the same business has nothing to match on.
- A customer who found you elsewhere and wants to write has to fill in a form - and many do not.
The fix is one line of HTML on your contact page. Keep the form, it is useful; put the address next to it.
The limits
- We read up to nine pages per site - contact, about, home and their common variants. An address hidden elsewhere escaped us, so the real rate is a little above 51%.
- An address shown as an IMAGE, to defeat scrapers, counts here as absent. That is consistent with what we measure - what a machine can read - but it is not the same as “not published”.
- Groups are uneven: 75 businesses in the United States, 29 in Belgium, 3 in Qatar - the last is too small for the table and we removed it.
- The sample is not random. These are businesses found in professional directories, so already listed somewhere: the 18% unreachable figure is a floor rather than a ceiling.