What we keep finding on small business websites

Every figure here is a count from our own scanner over the last 90 days: 6,761 free four-page scans that loaded at least one page. Of those, 6,627 were run by Go Voltic itself, our research sweep over a pool of small-business sites and our own monitoring, and 132 came from visitors using the free scan; a site counts once in the distinct-sites figure whoever scanned it. 2 predate the label that tells the two apart and are counted in the total without a side. Each finding links to what it means and how to fix it.

Structure

Finding	Share of scans	Scans	Sites	Severity
H1 missing or duplicated	57.8%	3,907	3,119	Warning
Meta description missing or the wrong length	51.3%	3,470	2,749	Warning
Thin heading structure	46.6%	3,151	2,510	Warning
Shared links preview badly	41.4%	2,801	2,180	Warning
No canonical URL declared	36.1%	2,439	1,925	Warning
Title length is off	28.6%	1,934	1,542	Warning
No favicon	23.8%	1,609	1,268	Low
No XML sitemap found	17.8%	1,201	937	Warning
This page is missing from its own sitemap	11.3%	761	606	Warning
No language attribute declared	10.7%	726	573	Serious
Page title is missing	7.1%	479	389	Critical
No robots.txt	6.2%	420	324	Low
The server sends a noindex header	4.3%	294	242	Serious
A linked page did not load	2.9%	194	169	Critical
The canonical URL points somewhere unexpected	1.6%	106	77	Warning
The page asks search engines not to index it	0.4%	30	28	Serious

AI and answer engines

Finding	Share of scans	Scans	Sites	Severity
No article or breadcrumb markup	77%	5,209	4,101	Low
Page content only appears after scripts run	76.2%	5,151	4,091	Serious
Page regions are not marked semantically	52%	3,517	2,801	Warning
No business entity in structured data	44.2%	2,985	2,370	Warning
No structured data	40.9%	2,763	2,204	Serious
No plain summary for machines to lift	29.4%	1,985	1,573	Warning
Home page is thin on content	20.6%	1,394	1,140	Warning
Structured data missing a required property	9.4%	636	497	Warning
Structured data that no longer earns a rich result	2.9%	199	148	Low
Structured data that does not parse	1.1%	74	65	Serious
AI crawlers are blocked in robots.txt	0.8%	56	47	Warning
Not all structured data was checked	0.6%	40	33	Low

Trust and privacy

Finding	Share of scans	Scans	Sites	Severity
No terms linked	75.2%	5,083	3,977	Low
No privacy policy linked	70.5%	4,767	3,735	Serious
No social proof above the fold	54.7%	3,697	2,989	Warning
No HSTS header	48.6%	3,285	2,524	Low
No security headers	46%	3,113	2,382	Warning
No obvious next step	43%	2,905	2,337	Serious
Tracking runs with no consent notice	41.8%	2,824	2,243	Critical
Insecure resources on a secure page	30.5%	2,059	1,634	Serious
No visible way to reach the site	30.4%	2,052	1,653	Serious
Plain http does not redirect	7.5%	508	387	Serious

Accessibility

Finding	Share of scans	Scans	Sites	Severity
No skip-to-content link	87.1%	5,886	4,616	Low
No main landmark	63.6%	4,303	3,389	Warning
Embedded frames have no title	24.9%	1,686	1,341	Low
Form fields without labels	17.9%	1,209	962	Serious
Images missing alt text	17.9%	1,208	956	Warning
Pinch-zoom is disabled	11.7%	793	614	Serious
Screen readers cannot tell the language	10.7%	726	573	Warning
No mobile viewport tag	9.6%	652	511	Critical

Speed

Finding	Share of scans	Scans	Sites	Severity
Render-blocking scripts	47.5%	3,214	2,553	Warning
Heavy HTML document	43%	2,908	2,320	Warning
Images all load at once	38.9%	2,627	2,064	Warning
Many separate stylesheet requests	37%	2,504	1,973	Warning
Images shift the layout as they load	32.9%	2,223	1,751	Warning
Slow server response	25.5%	1,722	1,513	Serious
Compression not confirmed	9.4%	633	496	Low

How to read these numbers

A share is the fraction of considered scans that raised the finding, over 6,761 scans. Each category page carries the sample size and a 95% interval alongside the share, because a percentage without a denominator is not a measurement. Figures were computed on 2026-10-22. No site we scanned is named anywhere on these pages.

The same data cut by trade is on the benchmarks pages.