Press and data
Busy Season Local measures whole trades rather than single businesses, and publishes the figures with the sweep and the date attached. If you are writing about local search, Google Business Profiles or small business visibility in New York, the measurements below are available to quote and the method is open to question.
Email the desk [email protected], or (917) 397-0493. Replies come from the person who ran the sweep, usually the same day and always within one business day.
Description, ready to paste
Busy Season Local is a one-person local marketing business in New York City and Long Island. It helps trade and service businesses get found on Google and in AI assistant answers, and measures whole categories to do it: every plumber, roofer or salon a search returns across a set of towns, read the same way on the same day.
Those sweeps are the source of the figures on this site. They are published with the roster they came from, the number of businesses read and the month they were read, and every number on every page is refused at build time unless a stored measurement licenses it.
What has been measured, and what it does not say
NYC and Long Island, September 2026. Each figure below names the population it describes. None of them is a national rate and none should be quoted as one.
What NYC and Long Island business homepages show
23294 business homepages were read one per domain in September 2026, from the websites on listings across the five boroughs, Nassau and Suffolk. 1128 end up on plain http, 10518 name no share picture, 727 carry only the retired Universal Analytics tag, 85 tell Google not to show them and 133 open a gambling page. The full reading is at /small-business-website-statistics.
Limit: Read from raw HTML, which is what these five readings are about. Footer years, phone links, headlines and forms were left out because a browser contradicted the raw reading on about half the sites checked by hand.
Listed websites that are no longer the business
3499 business websites were read as pages rather than as status codes, by following the website link on each Google listing the way a customer does. 27 of them load normally and open something that is not that business: 12 an online gambling site, 11 a registrar page selling the domain, 4 a blank server page. All of them return a healthy 200, which is why no link checker reports them.
Limit: One read, one month, four counties. Directional, not a rate. Several were re-fetched afterwards with a different client and cache headers and came back identical. No business is named, because none of the owners agreed to be an example.
Trades absent from their own town's results
Across nine Nassau trades, 1271 businesses were checked for whether they appear in the first sixty results when somebody searches for the best of their kind in the town they are based in.
Limit: Google returns twenty results a page and we read three. A town holding more businesses of one kind than the list has room for would force some out whatever they did, so that count is published separately: at this depth it is 0.
Sites that refused our request rather than failing
A website that answers a datacentre request with a 403 response or a bot challenge is refusing us, not failing a customer. Those are counted and reported separately rather than folded into a broken-site figure.
Limit: This distinction was added after an earlier count conflated the two and overstated the problem by more than half. The correction is the reason the two figures are separate now.
Who does the measuring
One person, working from Long Island, who builds the measurement tools, runs the sweeps, writes the pages and answers the phone. That is the reason the figures arrive with their limits attached rather than rounded off.
Available for comment on local search, Google Business Profiles, what small businesses actually get wrong about being found, and how AI assistants decide which local business to name. Also available to say when a number is too thin to carry a story, which is the more useful half. Name and a photograph on request, for attribution.
A high-resolution photograph and a logo pack are available on request by email.
Facts worth getting right
Business
Busy Season Local
Ownership
Sole proprietor, one person
Based
Long Island, New York
Serves
New York City and Long Island
Site
busyseasonlocal.com
How the figures may be used
Quote any figure on this site. Each one names the sweep, the population and the month, and those three things should travel with it.
Ask for the underlying roster if a figure matters to your piece. It will be sent, including the rows that do not support the headline.
No business measured in these sweeps is named anywhere, and none will be named on request. The owners did not agree to be examples.
If a figure here turns out to be wrong, it gets corrected on the page with what changed and why, not quietly edited. Two on this site already carry that history.
Working on something
Send the question and the deadline. If the data supports the story you will get the figures and the caveats; if it does not, you will get told that instead, which is faster for both of us.
Email the desk