Milan business websites: what we found in 27,460 sites
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Milan has five times Verona's businesses. Their websites are almost identical. We scanned 27,460 websites within the city limits, our biggest scan so far, with the same tool and the same rules we used for Verona, so the numbers compare directly with the Verona findings. Here are six things we found, from the full Milan report.
1. Same speed problem: the server answers in 86 ms, the content takes 7.1 seconds
The server responds in 86 ms (median, Verona 94). On mobile the main content appears after 7.1 seconds (Verona 7.5), and the Lighthouse performance score is 66 in both cities. One site in ten takes about 21 seconds or more. The cause is not the hosting: it is JavaScript (703 kB median) and images.
2. Same stack, slightly newer
38.9% of the sites run WordPress and 58.5% still load jQuery, five points less than in Verona. React is on 12.1% of Milan's sites, against 9.6% in Verona.
3. The one gap: AI readability
The median AI Crawlability Score, our measure of how readable a site is for ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, is 79.3 out of 100 in Milan, against 74.6 in Verona. Sectors differ: real estate averages 66 and restaurants 68, against 75 for fashion and cosmetics.
4. Structured data is still thin
Only 3.8% of sites have the essential structured data complete. The "LocalBusiness" block is present on 14.4% of sites, and among those that have it, 44.9% are missing opening hours.
5. Small fixes still waiting
Only 23.1% of images are in modern formats (WebP or AVIF), while 36% are JPG and 22% are PNG. And 10.4% of sites do not use HTTPS, so the browser flags them as "not secure".
6. An oddity: restaurants and hotels, but no booking
We found 7,212 restaurants and 1,533 places to stay in the city. Only 0.4% of sites have booking built in.
A note on method
The businesses come from Overture Maps, an open dataset that does not match the business register. We only measure the home page of sites that respond and do not have anti-bot protection. For Milan that means 27,460 sites and over 1 million images. The full approach is in our method page.
To date we have scanned over 79,000 websites in 83 cities, more than 211,000 pages and more than 2.5 million media files. The data is free to use under CC BY 4.0, citing the link to the report.
What to do with it
Most of these gaps are cheap to fix. If you want to see where your own site stands, our free SEO audit checks speed, structured data, images, HTTPS and the AI Crawlability Score on your home page. If you would rather have it fixed, our SEO services and web design services cover exactly these points.
