The last piece I wrote said I had checked thirty-two map listings and that eleven of the website links did not lead to the business. Two people asked the same thing in different words. Is that a Birmingham thing. Is that one bad street.So I did it twice more.Forty more listings in the same metro, none of them ones I had already checked. Then forty-four in a different city, four hours up the road, same method, same hands.One hundred and sixteen listing addresses in total. Sixteen of those got set aside: some refused to answer my automated visit at all, and a few turned out to be national chains that slipped past my filter. A hundred answered the question cleanly. Twenty-seven of those hundred did not lead a customer to the business.That is a little over one in four.The spread matters more than the average, so here it is plainly. First slice: eleven of the twenty-seven that answered. Same metro, fresh slice: ten of thirty-six. Different city: six of thirty-seven. Forty-one percent, twenty-eight percent, sixteen percent.I should tighten one number from the first piece, since I am quoting it. I wrote thirty-two because that is how many listings I pulled. Five of those never answered me. The honest figure for that slice is eleven of twenty-seven, not eleven of thirty-two. Same finding, better arithmetic.Forty-one to sixteen is not a constant. It is what three alphabetical slices of this size can produce when the failures are not evenly scattered. If you take one number out of all this, take the pooled one, and understand that it is an average over a range. Your own listing is one draw from that range, not a coin that owes you twenty-seven percent.Now the part I did not expect.The failure gets quieter the further you go.The first slice had the ugly cases. An expired domain bouncing through three unrelated German sites, somebody buying dead links for whatever authority they still carried. A shop whose own name was in the address, now serving a gambling page.The different city had almost none of that. Six failures, and they were mostly silence. Three domains do not resolve at all. One is parked. One never got its site connected, so the address serves the website builder's own error page. One loads and has the business name nowhere in it.No error worth remembering. No screen worth photographing. A customer taps, sees nothing that looks like a shop, and goes back to the map to pick somebody else. You never hear about it, because they never tell you.That is the whole shape of it. The loud failures get fixed, because somebody complains. The quiet ones sit for years.I am not naming any of the businesses, and I am not naming the streets. Half of them are probably fine in person, badly served by a link nobody has looked at since the day it was typed into a form. A dead link is not proof a shop is closed, and the owner may not be the person who typed it. Map listings get written by editors and imported from directories and filled in by customers.Which is the reason for the test, not against it.Ten seconds. Take out your phone and turn the wifi off, so you are on the network a stranger is on, because a site can load on your own network from a cached copy or a stale internal address that nobody else can reach. Search the name of your own business on a map. Tap the website link on your own listing, the one you did not put there. Then count how many taps it takes to reach a page with your name and your phone number on it.If it takes more than one, that is your afternoon. And then do it again tomorrow somewhere else, because your name lives on more maps than you think.I read small business sites for a living now. If you want yours read the way a customer reads it, this site finds me.

One hundred and sixteen listing addresses across two cities. Twenty-seven did not lead a customer to the business, and the failures get quieter the further you go.

I checked 116 map listings in two cities. Twenty-seven went nowhere.

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I checked 116 map listings in two cities. Twenty-seven went nowhere.

I checked 116 map listings in two cities. Twenty-seven went nowhere.

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