A random-sample audit of 574 Richmond-metro businesses: how many have a website, whether those sites are mobile-ready, and whether they carry the structured data AI search engines read.
Download the dataset (CSV) Read the methodology2500 businesses were drawn at random from the 43,469 active registered businesses in Richmond, Henrico, Chesterfield and Hanover. 574 of them could be confirmed as customer-facing operations rather than holding entities, and of those, 33.1% have no website at all. Among the ones that do, most are missing the technical signals that search engines and AI assistants use to understand and recommend a business.
190 of 574 · 95% CI 29.4–37.1%
153 of 377 · 95% CI 35.7–45.6%
30 of 377 · 95% CI 5.6–11.1%
278 of 377 · 95% CI 69.1–77.9%
llms.txt file, the emerging convention for telling AI crawlers what a site is about.Percentages carry a 95% Wilson confidence interval. The denominator differs by row: website presence is measured against every sampled business, while the technical measures are against businesses with a live, non-social website (377 in this run).
| Measure | Share | ± | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| No website at all | 33.1% | ±3.9 | 190/574 | |
| Social page instead of a website | 1.2% | ±0.9 | 7/574 | |
| No valid HTTPS | 9.3% | ±2.9 | 35/377 | |
| No mobile viewport | 8.0% | ±2.8 | 30/377 | |
| No Schema.org structured data | 40.6% | ±4.9 | 153/377 | |
| No LocalBusiness/Organization schema | 58.1% | ±4.9 | 219/377 | |
| No llms.txt | 73.7% | ±4.4 | 278/377 | |
| No robots.txt at all | 7.4% | ±2.6 | 28/377 | |
| Blocks at least one AI crawler | 2.4% | ±1.6 | 9/377 |
| Locality | Share | ± | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| No website — Richmond | 31.4% | ±6.3 | 64/204 | |
| No website — Henrico | 40.8% | ±7.6 | 64/157 | |
| No website — Chesterfield | 28.2% | ±7.0 | 44/156 | |
| No website — Hanover | 31.6% | ±11.8 | 18/57 |
Localities with fewer than 30 confirmed businesses in the sample are omitted rather than reported at a margin too wide to mean anything.
| Platform | Sites | Share |
|---|---|---|
| WordPress | 133 | 35.3% |
| Custom / unidentified | 121 | 32.1% |
| Wix | 52 | 13.8% |
| Squarespace | 46 | 12.2% |
| Shopify | 10 | 2.7% |
| Weebly | 8 | 2.1% |
| GoDaddy Builder | 7 | 1.9% |
Median time to first byte across live sites: 622 ms.
33.1% of small businesses in the Richmond metro area have no website, based on a random sample of 574 active registered businesses in Richmond, Henrico, Chesterfield and Hanover audited in 2026. The 95% confidence interval is 29.4% to 37.1%.
40.6% of live Richmond-metro business websites carry no Schema.org structured data, and 73.7% have no llms.txt file. Both are signals AI assistants use to identify and cite a business, so the large majority of local sites are effectively invisible to answer engines.
92.0% of live sites declare a mobile viewport. The remaining 8.0% were never built to render on a phone.
Virginia State Corporation Commission business entity registrations published on data.virginia.gov, combined with first-party audits of each business's web presence. The sample is drawn at random with a published seed so anyone can reproduce it exactly.
Yes. The figures and the underlying CSV are free to quote and republish with attribution to RVA Digital Works and a link to this page.
RVA Digital Works. "The State of Richmond Small Business Websites 2026." 2026-08-25. https://data.rvadigitalworks.com/
The dataset is published as CSV under the same terms. If you quote a figure, please include the sample size and the confidence interval — they are what make it worth quoting.