After the first piece, somebody asked whether eleven bad links out of thirty-two was a neighborhood thing. A bad street. A few blocks with bad luck.So I kept pulling. Same method every time: take the map listings that publish a website, walk an alphabetical slice of them, fetch each address once, and count what a customer actually gets.Third city now. Forty-two listings, none of them checked before. Four refused to answer me at all, and three more turned out to be franchise dealerships and a vendor page living inside somebody else's site. Thirty-five answered cleanly. Six did not lead a customer to the business.Across three cities that is one hundred and fifty-eight listings pulled. Twenty-three set aside for the two reasons above. A hundred and thirty-five answered the question. Thirty-three of those did not take a customer to the business.A little under one in four. Same pooled number as the last piece, because this new slice landed almost exactly on the old average.The spread, smallest city to largest: forty-one percent, twenty-eight percent, sixteen percent, seventeen percent. Four alphabetical slices of thirty-two, thirty-six, thirty-seven and thirty-five listings. Nothing in that is a constant. It is what slices this size produce when the failures are not evenly scattered. If you take one number out of all of this, take the pooled one, and hold it as an average over a range rather than a law. Your own listing is one draw from that range.Now the six, because the third city taught me something new.A domain that does not resolve at all. Not slow, not down for maintenance. There is no address to go to. Quiet for years, from the look of it.A domain whose own security seal fails validation, so the resolving service refuses to answer instead of sending a customer somewhere it cannot vouch for. Somebody set that seal and then let the key rot. To a customer it is the same nothing as the case above.A security certificate issued for another company. This is my favorite kind of quiet. The server is up and it answers. But the certificate on the door belongs to a different name, so the browser puts up a warning before anything loads, and most people stop there. The domain was pointed at a third-party platform and nobody checked what the platform would serve.A connection that simply times out. No page, no error, no explanation. The customer watches a little wheel and then picks somebody else off the map.A listing link pointing at a page that no longer exists, on a website that is completely fine. The shop moved its pages or rebuilt the site, and the old address stayed on the map. A working business with a dead door. Of everything on this list, this is the one I would fix first, because the fix is a form field.A website builder's own page saying the site has expired. The subscription lapsed. The address still answers, so nothing looks wrong from outside until you read the words on it.And one that does not fit in any column. The same bakery appears twice on the map, two listings, two addresses. One works. The other is a misspelling of the working one and resolves to nothing. Somebody typed it into a form years ago and nobody has clicked it since.That last one is the thing I want you to carry away. A dead link on a map listing is almost never a business failing. It is a field in a form, filled by an owner or an editor or an import or a customer, and then never opened again. You will not find it by looking at your shop. You will find it by clicking your own listing the way a stranger would.Two things I want to be honest about. Map listings are written by editors, imported from directories and sometimes filled in by customers, so a dead link is not proof anybody did anything wrong, or that the shop is closed. And these are alphabetical slices, not random samples. I can tell you that thirty-three of a hundred and thirty-five links did not lead to a business. I cannot tell you that this is true of most small businesses. I have not measured most small businesses.I am not naming any of them, or their streets. Half are probably excellent in person. What is dead is the link.The test is the same as before, and it takes ten seconds. Take your phone off the wifi. Search your business name. Tap the website link on your own listing. If you cannot get to your own front door in one tap, a stranger cannot either.Then do it on the second map, and the third. Your name lives on more of them than you think, and each one was typed by a different hand.

Forty-two more listings in a third city. Six did not lead a customer to the business, and the quiet failures now outnumber the loud ones.

I checked 158 map listings in three cities. Thirty-three went nowhere.

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I checked 158 map listings in three cities. Thirty-three went nowhere.

I checked 158 map listings in three cities. Thirty-three went nowhere.

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