What I found checking 26 Austin salon websites by hand

Cornelis Van Wyk — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 20:47:25 +0000

If you build websites or do local SEO, you have probably tried the obvious prospecting filter: "show me businesses with no website." I wanted to know what that filter misses, so I picked one city and one niche (Austin hair & beauty) and checked every candidate by hand.

What I did

I reviewed roughly 80 to 100 Austin hair, nail, barber, lash/brow and esthetician businesses. I found them through searches aimed at businesses likely to have online gaps, so this is not a random sample. Nothing below is a rate for "all Austin salons." It describes the 26 businesses that ended up on my list.

I left out chains and franchises, closed businesses, and any business that already had a working website with online booking. Of the businesses I reviewed, 26 qualified:

10 hair salons (including 3 braiding salons and 1 hair/barber shop)
7 nail salons
6 barbershops
3 lash/brow studios
0 estheticians. I checked about 8, and every one already had a working site with online booking.

For every website listed for a business (on its Google profile, directories, Yelp-style listings or social bios), I:

Requested it with curl, following redirects, with a mobile browser user agent.
Recorded the final status code, the final URL, the page size and the page language/title.
Re-tested every failure from a second network, so a single flaky connection wouldn't count as "dead."
Looked at the page itself: is this actually the business, and does the booking link go somewhere real?

I collected public business information only. No personal emails and no data about individuals.

The headline: "has a website" is often false

20 of the 26 had no working website on their own domain. They had no site at all, a dead one, a parked one, one pointing at the wrong business, or only a booking page or link-in-bio.

The part a "no website" filter misses: 10 of the 26 had a website listed publicly that was broken. A tool that only looks at whether the website field is filled in would mark all 10 as "has a website" and skip them.

Here is what those 10 listed websites actually did:

What the listed URL did	Count
Domain now belongs to something unrelated (a blog, an unrelated WordPress site returning HTTP 500, a German-language site)	3
Parked: a ~114-byte page that just JS-redirects to `/lander`	2
Old Google Business Sites (`business.site`) URL, now 404, still listed in directories	1
Wix domain disconnected (404 "connect your domain" page)	1
Server down (TLS connection dropped / 502)	1
Infinite 301 redirect loop	1
Listing points to a chain's corporate page, not the business	1

A few patterns stood out:

Parked pages return HTTP 200. A status-code check alone calls them "up." The giveaway was the tiny body size and the redirect to /lander.
Google's retired Business Sites URLs are still out there. Directories still show the business.site link even though it returns 404.
Lapsed domains get reused. Three "websites" now load something with no connection to the salon. Someone searching for the salon would land there.
Booking links break too. One booking-platform link sent visitors to a generic search page, and one booking-platform profile was an unclaimed placeholder.

When I re-checked the listed domains on 2026-10-28, three days later, they gave the same results.

The other gaps

Each business could have more than one gap. Across the 26:

Gap	Businesses
No working website	18
Name/address/phone inconsistent across listings	10
Facebook/Instagram is the only web presence	9
Few reviews	7
No online booking	6
Broken pages on the site	3
No own domain (booking page / link-in-bio only)	2
No prices shown	2
No mobile viewport	1
No valid HTTPS	1
Outdated copyright footer	0

I scored each business by how many distinct gaps it had. Most landed in the middle: 1 business scored 6, 5 scored 5, 13 scored 4, 4 scored 3 and 3 scored 2.

Geographically, the list clustered in a few areas. 8 were in 78753, 5 in 78752, 5 in 78745, 3 in 78741 and 2 in 78702, with one each in 78758, 78704 and 78727. That reflects where my searches turned things up as much as where gaps actually exist.

Limitations

Pre-selected sample. Don't read "10 of 26" as a rate for the whole city.
Review counts can lag behind what a live profile shows.
I didn't score social-media inactivity, even though it is often the real problem for Facebook/Instagram-only businesses.
Things change. A parked domain can come back tomorrow. Everything here is accurate only as of the check dates.

Takeaway for anyone prospecting local businesses

If you sell websites or local SEO, the "website" field in a listing is a claim, not a fact. A 30-second check (follow redirects, look at the body size, confirm the business name appears on the page) separates "has a website" from "has a website that works." In my small, biased sample, that check turned up 10 extra businesses that a blank-field filter would have skipped.