We Checked 272 Small Businesses in Portugal and Spain. A Third Have No Website

There is a lot of confident talk about how "every business is online now." We wanted to see what that actually looks like at street level, so in July 2026 we pulled the public Google Maps listings of 272 small businesses across six cities in Portugal and Spain and recorded three simple things: does this business have a website, what phone number does it publish, and how many reviews does it have. The result is not a national statistic — we say exactly why at the end — but the pattern that came out was consistent enough to be worth publishing. Roughly one in three of these businesses has no website at all, and the number climbs sharply once you leave the capital.

How we collected the data

We sampled 272 businesses listed on Google Maps: 152 in Portugal (Lisbon, Porto, Braga) and 120 in Spain (Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia). We covered six trade types that make up the bulk of any high street — cafés and bakeries, shops, hair salons and barbershops, tradespeople and service businesses, grocery shops and mini-markets, and auto repair shops. For each listing we recorded the presence or absence of a website field, whether the published phone number was a mobile number or a landline, the average rating, and the review count where it was available. Everything came from what the business itself has published on its own listing. No scraping of private data, no surveys, no estimates.

The headline numbers

• Portugal (n=152): 32.9% have no website · 46.1% publish a mobile number · 13.8% have neither a website nor a landline — mobile only · average rating 4.54
• Spain (n=120): 36.7% have no website · 45.8% publish a mobile number · 16.7% are mobile-only with no website · average rating 4.59
• The two countries track each other closely: Spain runs about four points behind Portugal on website adoption, and the mobile-number share is nearly identical
• Ratings are high on both sides and barely differ — having no website is clearly not a proxy for running a bad business

Finding 1: the further from the capital, the fewer websites

This was the cleanest pattern in the whole dataset, and it holds in both countries independently. In Portugal, the share of businesses with no website rises from 27.3% in Lisbon to 35.7% in Porto to 38.6% in Braga. In Spain the same staircase appears — 29.0% in Madrid, 38.1% in Barcelona — and then jumps to 53.3% in Valencia, where more than half the businesses we sampled had no website field at all. Whatever is driving website adoption, it is concentrated in the capitals and thins out fast. A Valencia shop owner is roughly twice as likely to be running without a website as a Madrid shop owner in the same trade.

Businesses with no website, by city

• Lisbon — 27.3%
• Madrid — 29.0%
• Porto — 35.7%
• Barcelona — 38.1%
• Braga — 38.6%
• Valencia — 53.3%

Businesses with no website, by sector

• Spain, food shops / alimentación (grocery and food retail) — 70.8% (n=24). By far the highest in the study
• Portugal, grocery shops / mercearia (neighbourhood grocery) — 44.0% (n=25)
• Portugal, auto repair / oficina (garage) — 43.8% (n=32)
• Portugal, cafés and pastry shops — 41.7% (n=24)
• Spain, auto repair / taller (garage) — 37.9% (n=29)
• Spain, hair salons / peluquería — 28.6% (n=21)
• Spain, bars — 22.7% (n=22)
• Spain, sole traders and services / autónomo, servicios — 20.8% (n=24)
• Portugal, barbershops and hair salons — 18.4% (n=38). The lowest in the study

Finding 2: the sector gap is bigger than the country gap

The spread between the highest and lowest sector — 70.8% down to 18.4% — dwarfs the four-point difference between Portugal and Spain. Trade matters far more than nationality. The pattern underneath it is about how customers book. Barbershops and hair salons sit at the bottom of the no-website list because appointments run through Instagram and messaging apps; the social profile has effectively replaced the website, so there is nothing left for a website to do. Food shops sit at the top because their customers walk in, and no amount of web presence changes that. Auto repair shops fall in the middle in both countries at around 38-44%, which fits a trade where the customer calls, describes a noise, and gets told to bring the car in on Thursday.

How visible are these businesses? (review counts)

• We had usable review data for 140 listings
• 31.4% have fewer than 50 reviews
• 48.6% have fewer than 100 reviews — nearly half the sample
• 20% have 500 or more reviews
• Read together: the review distribution is heavily bottom-loaded, with a small group of very visible businesses and a long tail of quiet ones. We did not collect complete review data on the Spanish side, so we make no review claim for Spain

What this actually means: offline but reachable

The most useful number in this study is not the website figure on its own — it is the overlap. In Portugal 13.8% of businesses, and in Spain 16.7%, have no website but do publish a mobile number. That is roughly one in seven businesses that has decided a website is not worth the effort but still wants to be reached directly, on a phone, by a person. These are not businesses hiding from technology. They are businesses that adopted the tools with the lowest setup cost and the fastest payoff, and skipped everything else. It is the same logic that decides how their books get kept: whatever happens on the phone that is already in their hand, happens. Whatever requires opening a laptop at 9pm, mostly doesn't.

Limits of this study — read these before quoting the numbers

• The sample is not random. Listings were taken in Google Maps search order, which favours businesses Google already ranks well. That is a real selection bias and it probably makes these businesses look more digitally established than the true population, not less
• Only businesses already listed on Google Maps are included. Businesses with no listing at all — likely the least digitised group of all — are entirely outside our scope
• Some city and sector cells are small (n=20 to n=38). The Valencia figure of 53.3% and the Spanish food-shop figure of 70.8% are the two most striking numbers in the study and also two of the smaller cells. Treat them as signals worth checking, not as settled facts
• Review data was collected incompletely on the Spanish side, so we drew no review conclusions for Spain
• This is a field sample from July 2026, not a national statistic. It describes 272 specific businesses at one moment in time. We are publishing the sample sizes alongside every figure precisely so you can judge how much weight each one carries