Verona businesses: how many have a website, and how well it works

The 9,877 businesses we counted, by sector. The three largest: restaurants (12%), lodging (8.1%), and beauty and wellness (8%).

The count comes from Overture Maps, an open dataset of places: these are the businesses a customer finds on a map, not the entries of the official business register.

Of the 2,329 businesses that list a website we could not open, 1,083 (46.5%) point to a domain or server that does not answer, 450 (19.3%) have a site whose bot protection stopped our tool, 414 (17.8%) open an error page, 268 (11.5%) list a social profile or a platform page instead of a website, 113 (4.9%) fail to connect, on a network error or a timeout, and 1 (0%) have an address we could not read.

A domain that does not answer has usually expired or lost its hosting; an error page is often the address of a site that was rebuilt or closed, left behind on the map. Among the profiles and platforms listed instead of a website, the most common is Instagram (101). The 450 businesses with a protected site are a separate case: the server answers with a bot check page (status 202 or 403), so the site most likely opens for someone visiting it in a browser, but we could not audit it. That is a limit of the tool, not a broken site: counting them, the businesses with a working website would rise to at most 5,498, 55.7%.

On the main page of 4,481 sites, the median scores are 53 out of 100 for performance (mean 54.2), 87 for accessibility (mean 85.3), 96 for best practices (mean 86.8), and 92 for SEO (mean 91.8).

Performance sits in the middle band (50 to 89): the page works, but on a phone with a slow mobile connection the wait is noticeable. Half the sites take more than 7.5 seconds to show their main content, the largest photo or block of text: above 4 seconds, the point where Google calls it poor. Accessibility needs work: many sites still have low contrast text, buttons without a name, or form fields a screen reader cannot read.

Of 4,739 working sites, 24.5% have no valid sitemap, 53.7% show no Search Console verification we can see, 33.5% have no meta description on the home page, and 30.3% do not state a canonical URL for the home page.

A sitemap is the list of pages a site hands to Google. Search Console is the free tool where the owner sees which searches the site appears for and whether Google finds errors. The meta description is the text under the title in search results: without one, Google picks its own. A canonical URL tells Google which version of a page to show when several copies exist.

Across 4,739 working sites the AI score median is 75 out of 100 (mean 70.1): half the sites score at least 75, and the middle half sits between 58.6 and 85.

The score says how well an assistant such as ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini can read the site and tell what the business is: whether the text shows without running code, whether the site lets their crawlers in, whether there is structured data. The check with the lowest result is "llms.txt file": only 26.4% of sites pass it.

We checked the server of every working site against three spam blocklists (Spamhaus, Barracuda and SpamCop). Of 4,613 sites with an answer, 43 (0.9%) sit on a blocklisted server: 30 servers out of 2,470.

A spam blocklist lists the addresses spam was sent from. It does the website no harm: the site opens and shows up on Google as before. The risk is email: if the business sends it from that server, confirmations, quotes and replies to customers can land in the spam folder and never be read. The server is often shared with many other sites, and the flag comes from one of them.