We checked 3,820 Long Island business websites

A real request to every domain, one at a time

We keep a working book of Long Island businesses, and 3,820 of them had a web address on file. In September 2026 every one of those addresses was checked the way a customer’s phone checks it: look up the domain, then ask the server for the page.

• ✓  DNS first. Does the domain still exist at all? A lapsed domain has no record, and no firewall can fake that.
• ✓  Then HTTP, then HTTPS. Some of these only answer on the insecure one, which is its own finding.
• ✓  No paid tools and no third-party index. Nothing here is a cached result from somebody else’s crawler. If it says a site did not load, it did not load that day.

That matters because the usual way this gets measured is by reading a business listing, and listings are wrong constantly. A Google profile with no website link does not mean there is no website. It often means there is one and it is broken.

What 3,820 live checks returned

269 businesses have a website that is broken, gone, or no longer theirs. That is the bottom five rows added together, and it is a little over seven percent of the book. Every one of those is a business still answering its phone, still on Google, still paying for something that is not working.

A lapsed domain does not sit empty. It gets bought.

The five parked domains were supposed to be the smallest and dullest category. They were not.

They belong to unrelated Long Island businesses in different trades and different towns — an advertising firm, a martial arts school, a landscaping company among them. Two of them now resolve to the same server. All of them now show a page offering the domain for sale, run by one of the large national domain resellers that buy expiring names automatically, in bulk, the moment they drop.

So the address that has been on that company’s trucks, business cards and Google listing for years still works. It just no longer goes to them. It goes to a sales page with an out-of-state phone number on it.

We re-checked all of this on 29 September, two weeks after the original scan, and every one of them was still gone or still parked. The martial arts school’s old address is currently listed at $1,695. That is the part worth sitting with: the domain you stopped paying about fifteen dollars a year for is now an asset somebody else owns, and buying your own name back is priced in thousands.

None of this is aimed at Long Island specifically. It is automated and it is national, which is arguably worse — nobody targeted these businesses, and nobody is going to notice on their behalf either.

We are not naming the businesses. They have not been told yet, and publishing a list of companies whose old web address is now for sale would make the problem worse rather than better.

Three things worth doing whether or not you hire anybody

• ✓  Type your own web address into a phone, not a bookmark. Bookmarks and autofill hide a dead domain from the one person who would fix it. Type it the way a stranger would.
• ✓  Try it with and without the www. Plenty of these answer on one and not the other, and half your customers guess the wrong one.
• ✓  Check the old address too. If you have ever changed web addresses, the previous one is the one at risk. It is still on the old cards and the old truck lettering.

If it loads and looks fine, you are in the 2,245 and you can stop reading. If anything above looked wrong, the free scanner will run Google’s own test against it and show you what it saw, in about fifteen seconds, without asking for anything.

The honest limits, because the numbers are only useful if they are real

That 1,152 figure is the weak one. The test was whether the business’s own phone number appears on its own page. It fires on sites that load the number with JavaScript, on businesses that use a separate tracking number, and on anyone who simply changed their phone since we recorded it. We deliberately did not treat any of those as a problem, and neither should you.

The 153 blocked requests are not broken sites. A firewall refusing an automated visitor is a site behaving correctly. Counting those as failures would have inflated the headline by more than half, which is exactly how this kind of research usually gets exaggerated.

A site can load perfectly and still be losing you work. Nothing in this check measures whether a page is slow on a phone, whether the number can be tapped, or whether anyone can find it on Google in the first place. Those are the more common problems. They are just not the ones a DNS lookup can see.

This is one book, not a census of Long Island. 3,820 businesses is a large sample and it is not a random one — it is weighted toward the trades and local services we work with. Treat seven percent as what we found, not as a law.

Common questions