Press kit: Richmond small business websites

Who to call

Jake Chaney, RVA Digital Works, Richmond, Virginia.
jake@rvadigitalworks.com
(804) 608-6508

Available for comment, background, or an on-camera interview the same day you ask. If you want a cut of the data that is not published here — a single locality, a single trade, a comparison against last year once there is a last year — ask and it will be run.

Free to embed

No permission needed, no attribution beyond a credit line and a link. The confidence intervals are drawn on the image on purpose.

Download the PNG (1600×900)

<a href="https://data.rvadigitalworks.com/">
  <img src="https://data.rvadigitalworks.com/chart-no-website-by-locality.png"
       alt="Share of Richmond-metro small businesses with no website, by locality"
       style="max-width:100%;height:auto">
</a>
<p><small>Source: RVA Digital Works,
  <a href="https://data.rvadigitalworks.com/">The State of Richmond Small Business Websites 2026</a></small></p>

Lines you can lift verbatim

• About a third of Richmond-area small businesses have no website at all — 33.1% of the 574 we could confirm, give or take 3.9 points.
• Henrico came out worst at 40.8%, Chesterfield best at 28.2%, but the intervals overlap — treat that as a hint, not a league table.
• Of the businesses that do have a site, 40.6% carry no structured data and 73.7% have no llms.txt. Those are the two things an AI assistant reads to work out what a business is. Most Richmond businesses are not answering the question.
• 55.1% of the businesses with a Google profile have fewer than ten reviews.

The one thing we would rather you not misstate

The rest of what could be wrong with these numbers is listed at known limitations — including the fact that the no-website figure is an upper bound, not a point estimate, because a business whose domain looks nothing like its registered name can slip past the probe.

What makes this checkable

• It is a random draw, not a lead list. The sample comes from Virginia State Corporation Commission registrations published on data.virginia.gov, drawn with random.sample under a published seed. Redraw it yourself and you get the same 2,500 businesses.
• The raw records are published. One row per audited business in the CSV, including the evidence for every website match. You can check our arithmetic or find your own angle in it.
• The method is written down before the findings. Population, exclusions, measurement, and error bounds are on the methodology page.
• Every figure carries an interval. Wilson score at 95%. Where the intervals overlap we say so instead of ranking.

Rights

Published under CC BY 4.0. Quote it, republish it, rebuild the chart your own way, put the CSV in your own analysis. The only ask is attribution to RVA Digital Works and a link to https://data.rvadigitalworks.com.

Where this has been cited

Nothing yet — this edition is newly published. Coverage will be listed here as it runs.