76 local business search statistics for 2026, with original sources

Every figure below has been traced to the organisation that produced it, not to the roundup that repeated it. The sources are Ofcom, the Department for Business and Trade, the Office for National Statistics, Google's own documentation and announcements, Pew Research Center, BrightLocal and Whitespark. Each stat carries its publisher, its date and a link to the page the number appears on. Where a figure describes US consumers rather than UK ones, it says so. Where a source is dated, dormant or disagrees with itself, that is stated rather than hidden. One section covers the local SEO statistics that turned out to have no traceable source at all.

Key takeaways

• 71% of UK adult internet users searched for information related to a potential purchase, making it the single most searched-for topic online. Commercial research is the most common thing people use the internet for, ahead of news and hobbies. (Ofcom, December 2025)
• 95% of UK adult internet users had searched for information online in the past three months. Search is effectively universal among UK adults who are online at all. (Ofcom, December 2025)
• 97% of consumers read reviews for local businesses. Review presence is not a differentiator any more; its absence is a disqualifier. (BrightLocal, February 2026, US)
• 31% of consumers will only use a business rated 4.5 stars or higher, up from 17% a year earlier. The threshold nearly doubled in twelve months, so a rating that passed in 2025 may not pass now. (BrightLocal, February 2026, US)
• 89% of consumers expect business owners to respond to reviews. Non-response is now read as a signal about the business rather than as neutral. (BrightLocal, February 2026, US)
• Only 35% of US small and medium businesses have a Google Business Profile. The gap between what local search rewards and what most businesses have set up remains very wide. (BrightLocal, August 2025, US)
• Google's share as a review source fell from 83% in 2025 to 71% in 2026. Google still leads by a distance, but a single-platform review strategy covers less of the audience than it did. (BrightLocal, February 2026, US)
• There were 5.64 million small businesses with 0 to 49 employees in the UK at the start of 2025. This is the denominator for any claim about UK small business behaviour. (Department for Business and Trade, October 2025)
• 81.4% of UK businesses with 10 to 49 employees had a website in 2019. This is the most recent official UK figure available: the ONS series has not been updated since. (Office for National Statistics, February 2021, 2019 data)
• 54% of consumers visit a business's website after reading positive reviews, up from 32% when the question was last asked in 2019. Reviews increasingly send people to the website rather than replacing the need for one. (BrightLocal, February 2026, US)
• Use of ChatGPT and other generative AI tools for local business recommendations rose from 6% to 45% in a year, making AI the third most popular source. No other discovery channel in this dataset has moved that fast. (BrightLocal, February 2026, US)
• Google users who saw an AI summary clicked a traditional search result in 8% of visits, against 15% for users who saw none. Appearing in the results is worth roughly half as much when an AI summary sits above them. (Pew Research Center, July 2025, US)
• The single most-cited statistic in local SEO has no published source. Section 9 traces it to a deleted tweet.

How much of search is local?

Ofcom's Online Nation report is the closest thing the UK has to an official measure of what people do online. These figures come from its December 2025 edition.

Information about a hobby or interest was searched by 58% of UK adult internet users in the past three months. It ranked third behind purchase research and UK news, which is useful context for how commercial the average search session actually is. (Ofcom, December 2025)

Google handles around 3 billion UK web searches a month. The figure is Similarweb's, published by Ofcom, and covers web visits from fixed and mobile devices in August 2025. (Ofcom, December 2025, citing Similarweb)

49.1 million UK adults accessed the internet via smartphones, tablets and computers in May 2025. Ofcom publishes this from Ipsos Iris measurement data rather than survey self-report. (Ofcom, December 2025, citing Ipsos Iris)

UK adults spent an average of 4 hours and 30 minutes online each day in May 2025, ten minutes more than a year earlier. Time online is still growing, slowly, from an already high base. (Ofcom, December 2025, citing Ipsos Iris)

Smartphones accounted for 77% of all time UK adults spent online, up from 75% the year before. Any local search experience that is awkward on a phone is awkward for roughly three-quarters of the time people spend online. (Ofcom, December 2025, citing Ipsos Iris)

What do people do before choosing a local business?

These figures are from BrightLocal's Local Consumer Review Survey, a panel of 1,002 US adults surveyed via SurveyMonkey and published in February 2026. They describe US consumers.

66% of consumers do further research after reading a positive review, while 34% are ready to buy or book. A good review starts the decision far more often than it finishes it. (BrightLocal, February 2026, US)

93% of consumers have made a purchase after reading reviews. Review reading converts to spending for almost everyone at some point, which is why the channel resists decline. (BrightLocal, February 2026, US)

27% of consumers have spent more than $1,000 after reading reviews, and 13% more than $5,000. Reviews influence high-value purchases, not only low-consideration ones. (BrightLocal, February 2026, US)

70% of consumers have made a purchase they later regretted after reading reviews. Reviews reduce risk without removing it, which is part of why authenticity matters as much as volume. (BrightLocal, February 2026, US)

The average consumer uses six different review sites when choosing a business. A presence on one platform covers a fraction of where the decision actually gets made. (BrightLocal, February 2026, US)

How much do online reviews matter?

Consumer expectations on rating, recency and response all moved in the same direction this year, and they moved fast.

47% of consumers will not use a business with fewer than 20 reviews. Review count works as a credibility threshold before rating is even considered. (BrightLocal, February 2026, US)

74% of consumers only seek reviews written in the last three months. Review collection has to be continuous, because a strong profile decays into an irrelevant one. (BrightLocal, February 2026, US)

68% of consumers will only use a business with four or more stars, up from 55% in 2025. Two-thirds of the market is now closed to businesses below four stars. (BrightLocal, February 2026, US)

85% of consumers are more likely to use a business after reading positive reviews. This is the clearest single measure of what a review profile is worth. (BrightLocal, February 2026, US)

49% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. Roughly half the market treats strangers' opinions as equivalent to a friend's. (BrightLocal, February 2026, US)

80% of consumers say they are likely to use a business that responds to all of its reviews. Responding is a visible behaviour that affects people who never leave a review themselves. (BrightLocal, February 2026, US)

19% of consumers expect a response to their review the same day they post it, up from 6% in 2025. Same-day response expectation tripled in a year. (BrightLocal, February 2026, US)

Google blocked or removed more than 240 million policy-violating reviews from 2024, the vast majority before they were seen. This figure usually circulates attributed to a news blog; Google published it directly. (Google, April 2025)

Google placed posting restrictions on more than 900,000 accounts that repeatedly violated its content policies. Enforcement targets repeat accounts, not only individual reviews. (Google, April 2025)

How do people interact with a Google Business Profile?

Google's own enforcement disclosures and BrightLocal's consumer data give two different views of the same surface.

45% of consumers left a Google review in the past year, making it the most used review-writing platform. Google leads on writing as well as reading, which compounds its review volume advantage. (BrightLocal, February 2026, US)

Apple Maps use for reviews nearly doubled, from 14% in 2025 to 27% in 2026. Apple Maps only allows a rating rather than written text, which may explain the low friction. (BrightLocal, February 2026, US)

Only 17% of SMBs use business directories and just 15% use review platforms. Most small businesses are not actively managing the surfaces their customers check. (BrightLocal, August 2025, US)

Google blocked or removed more than 70 million policy-violating edits to places on Maps in 2024. Listing data is attacked at scale, not only reviews. (Google, April 2025)

Google removed or blocked more than 12 million fake Business Profiles in 2024. Fake profiles compete directly with real businesses for local visibility. (Google, April 2025)

Google removed over 10,000 listings run by a single group impersonating locksmiths to take over unclaimed Business Profiles, and sued the operators. Unclaimed profiles are an active target, which is an argument for claiming one even if it is never optimised. (Google, April 2025)

Google has rolled out consumer alerts in the US, UK and India warning when suspicious five-star reviews have recently been removed from a business. Buying reviews now carries a visible consumer-facing penalty. (Google, April 2025)

Which factors actually affect local ranking?

Only Google knows the algorithm. What follows separates what Google states publicly from what practitioners estimate.

Google states that local results are based mainly on relevance, distance and prominence. Google's own page is inconsistent here: its summary sentence says "relevance, distance, and popularity" while the heading for the third factor reads "Prominence". (Google, Business Profile Help)

Google states there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking. Any offer to buy local pack placement contradicts Google's published position. (Google, Business Profile Help)

Google states prominence is based partly on how many websites link to a business and how many reviews it has. This is the only official confirmation that links and review counts feed local ranking. (Google, Business Profile Help)

The Local Search Ranking Factors report is built from 47 local search experts scoring 187 factors in a two-hour survey. It is the most-cited practitioner consensus on local ranking, and it is opinion aggregated at scale rather than measurement. (Whitespark, 2026)

Whitespark states none of its contributing experts have special access to the internal workings of Google's local search algorithm. The publisher's own caveat should travel with every figure taken from the report. (Whitespark, 2026)

How many UK businesses are actually findable online?

This is the section the US-authored roundups do not have. The figures come from the Department for Business and Trade and the Office for National Statistics, with the caveats those bodies attach to them.

Small businesses made up 99.18% of the entire UK private sector business population. Any statement about "UK business" is, statistically, a statement about small business. (Department for Business and Trade, October 2025)

The UK had 38,435 medium-sized businesses and 8,335 large businesses at the start of 2025. Together they account for well under 1% of the business population. (Department for Business and Trade, October 2025)

The UK private sector business population grew by 3.5%, or 191,000 businesses, between 2024 and 2025. Growth resumed after several flat years. (Department for Business and Trade, October 2025)

UK business numbers peaked near 6.0 million at the start of 2020 and have fallen by 290,000, or 4.9%, since. The population is still below its pre-pandemic high despite the recent rebound. (Department for Business and Trade, October 2025)

Non-employing businesses accounted for 84% of all UK private sector business growth since 2010. The growth is overwhelmingly sole traders and owner-only companies, which is the segment least likely to have marketing resource. (Department for Business and Trade, October 2025)

96.9% of UK businesses with 1,000 or more employees had a website in 2019, against 81.4% of those with 10 to 49 employees. The gap between large and small is the clearest official UK measure of the digital divide, and it is now six years old. (Office for National Statistics, February 2021, 2019 data)

Only 40% of US SMBs have a dedicated business website, behind Facebook at 50% and Instagram at 44%. More US small businesses have a social profile than a site they control. This is US data; no equivalent current UK figure is published. (BrightLocal, August 2025, US)

54% of US small business owners manage their marketing entirely on their own. Marketing capacity, not marketing knowledge, is often the binding constraint. (BrightLocal, August 2025, US)

What does local visibility actually convert to?

Before quoting any Google Business Profile benchmark, it is worth knowing how Google counts. These definitions are from Google's own performance documentation and they change what the numbers mean.

Google Business Profile performance data is available only for verified Business Profiles. Every published GBP benchmark therefore excludes unverified businesses entirely, which biases the sample towards more active operators. (Google, Business Profile Help)

Google counts profile views as unique visitors, not total views, and states a person can only be counted once a day. A "view" is closer to a daily reach figure than to an impression count. (Google, Business Profile Help)

Google warns that the views figure in performance reports can be lower than the views shown on the profile itself and in its own email notifications. Two Google surfaces can report different numbers for the same profile. (Google, Business Profile Help)

Google counts a call as a click on the call button, and the metric only works if a phone number has been added to the profile. Businesses without a listed number record zero calls regardless of how many they receive. (Google, Business Profile Help)

Google changed how it counts direction requests to strip out multiple taps, cancelled requests and spam. Direction-request trends that span the change are not comparing like with like. (Google, Business Profile Help)

Google updates the search-terms metric at the start of each month and says it can take up to five days to appear. Recent query data is incomplete by design, not missing. (Google, Business Profile Help)

How is AI search changing local discovery?

The measured effects fall into two groups: how many people are using AI tools, and what happens to clicks when they do.

40% of consumers trust AI platforms to provide business recommendations, while 32% do not. Trust already outweighs distrust for a technology most people have used for under two years. (BrightLocal, February 2026, US)

82% of consumers read AI-generated review summaries, and 23% would rely on the summary alone. Almost a quarter of people never reach the reviews themselves. (BrightLocal, February 2026, US)

ChatGPT recorded 252 million UK web visits in August 2025, up 156% year on year. Growth is from a large base, not a standing start. (Ofcom, December 2025, citing Similarweb)

ChatGPT had 1.8 billion UK visits in the first eight months of 2025, up from 368 million in the same period of 2024. UK usage grew roughly fivefold year on year. (Ofcom, December 2025, citing Similarweb)

53% of UK people say they often see AI summaries in search results. Most exposure to AI answers is passive, arriving through ordinary Google use. (Ofcom, December 2025, citing YouGov, February 2025)

Six months after first visiting ChatGPT, users' Google search clicks fall by 26%. This is Similarweb analysis of US users, published by Ofcom, and should not be read as a UK measurement. (Ofcom, December 2025, citing Similarweb, US data)

Users clicked a link inside the AI summary itself in just 1% of visits to pages carrying one. Being cited inside an AI answer earns visibility and attribution far more often than it earns a click. (Pew Research Center, July 2025, US)

26% of visits to a Google page with an AI summary ended the browsing session entirely, against 16% of pages with only traditional results. AI answers end more journeys than they redirect. (Pew Research Center, July 2025, US)

18% of all Google searches studied generated an AI summary in March 2025. Roughly one search in five, measured across 68,879 real searches rather than a keyword sample. (Pew Research Center, July 2025, US)

58% of respondents ran at least one Google search in March 2025 that produced an AI summary. Most people encounter AI answers even though most individual searches do not produce one. (Pew Research Center, July 2025, US)

What do AI summaries actually cite?

Pew reconstructed the first page of results for 68,879 real Google searches, which makes this the clearest public picture of what AI answers draw on.

88% of AI summaries cited three or more sources, and only 1% cited a single source. AI answers spread attribution across several sources, so being one of several citable pages is a realistic goal. (Pew Research Center, July 2025, US)

The median AI summary was 67 words long, ranging from seven words to 369. The answers are short, which favours sources that state a fact cleanly in one sentence. (Pew Research Center, July 2025, US)

Just 8% of one or two-word searches produced an AI summary, rising to 53% for searches of ten words or more. Longer, more specific queries are far more likely to be answered by AI. (Pew Research Center, July 2025, US)

60% of queries beginning with question words such as who, what, when or why produced an AI summary. Question-shaped queries are the ones AI answers most often. (Pew Research Center, July 2025, US)

Government websites made up 6% of sources linked in AI summaries against 2% in standard search results. AI answers lean harder on official sources than ordinary search results do. (Pew Research Center, July 2025, US)

Local SEO statistics that no longer have a source

Several figures quoted across the first page of Google for this topic could not be traced to a living primary source. Each entry below states what was searched, what was found, and what was not. These are findings about the evidence, not claims that the underlying behaviour is false.

The most-cited figure in local SEO, that 46% of Google searches have local intent, traces to a single 2018 tweet relaying a remark at an unrecorded Google event. Search Engine Roundtable's report is headlined as a question, "Did Google Say 46% Of Searches Have Local Intent?", and states plainly: "Supposedly there was a local event at the main Google headquarters... I do trust the source but all I have is a tweet from this SEO on this stat." Google has never published the figure. (Search Engine Roundtable, October 2018)

The journalist who reported the 46% figure doubted it in the same post, writing that "46% does seem super high". The scepticism was dropped as the number was copied onward; the figure now appears as settled fact on three of the nine pages ranking for "local SEO statistics". The tweet it rests on returns a 404 as of 12 September 2026. (Search Engine Roundtable, October 2018)

The claim that 97% of people learn more about a local company online than anywhere else is attributed across the results to SEO Tribunal, a domain that no longer hosts the research. seotribunal.com now resolves to an SEO agency directory titled "20 Best SEO agencies in USA", and the path the statistic is cited from returns no response. (seotribunal.com, checked 12 September 2026)

Sources sometimes disagree with themselves: Ofcom's Online Nation 2025 states that 30% of keyword searches return AI overviews, while the footnote attached to that same sentence is titled "39.9%". Both appear in the same PDF, which is a reminder to cite the exact sentence rather than the report. (Ofcom, December 2025)

Methodology

How sources were selected. Every figure was traced to the organisation that produced it. Where a statistic was found in a roundup, the roundup's citation was followed to its root and the root was cited instead; where the chain dead-ended, the statistic was excluded rather than repeated. Statistics roundups, AI-generated answers and Wikipedia were not used as sources.

How figures were verified. Each stat was checked against the exact page it is attributed to on 12 September 2026, by automated string match against the live page where the publisher permits automated access, and by manual confirmation against the publisher's own PDF or rendered page where it does not. 76 of 76 figures were confirmed present at source. None were approximated or rounded to fit.

What was excluded. BrightLocal's SMB 2025 report gives 70% for the share of owners seeing material costs rise in its body text and 67% in its key findings; the figure was dropped rather than choosing between them. Whitespark's ranking-factor group weightings are published only inside a chart image and could not be verified from page text, so they are not quoted here.

Known limitations. BrightLocal and Pew data describe US respondents. Ofcom, the Department for Business and Trade and the ONS describe the UK. The ONS e-commerce series has not been updated since 2019 and its next release is listed as "to be announced"; its response rate that year was 62%, down from 76%, and the ONS advises caution. Its figures for businesses with fewer than 10 employees are explicitly unreliable, so the website-adoption figure quoted here is for 10 to 49 employees. The Department for Business and Trade's Business Population Estimates lost accredited official statistics status in 2024 and remain "official statistics in development", with unregistered business numbers estimated rather than counted. Several Ofcom figures are Similarweb, Ipsos Iris or YouGov data published by Ofcom rather than Ofcom's own measurement, and are attributed as such.

Refresh schedule. This page is re-verified quarterly, with every source URL re-checked and decayed figures replaced. The next review is due 12 December 2026.

Citing this page

These figures are free to quote with attribution to SEO Pages and a link to this page. If you are checking how your own business performs against these benchmarks, our free tools cover the basics, and the local hub explains how the work fits together.