SEO statistics Belgium 2026: 586 small business sites measured

Of the Belgian small business websites that work, 55.5 percent fail at least one of four search basics. Nearly all run on https and fit a phone, but 36.5 percent have no meta description and 28.8 percent no H1, the heading that tells a search engine what the page is about. One in five website links listed publicly for a business no longer leads anywhere.

In October 2026 we measured the websites of 586 Belgian small businesses: bakers, hairdressers, dentists, garages, builders, accountants and restaurants across every province. For each site we checked what Google, an AI assistant and a visitor on a phone get to see. As far as we know, no one had measured these things together in Belgium before. Below are the results, by sector, province and platform, with the full dataset. To check a site of your own, run it through our SEO checker.

Four search basics, and who has them

For this study, the basics are four things every site needs to be found and understood by Google: a secure connection (https), a page that fits a phone, a title and a meta description, and an H1. None of them costs money or needs a new website.

The weak spot is not the tech but the text. The description is the line under your title in Google; without one, Google picks a fragment of the page. The H1 tells Google and AI assistants what the page is mainly about. Of 427 working sites, 60 lack both.

One in five links leads nowhere

Before measuring anything, a large share dropped out. Of the 586 websites listed for a Belgian business on OpenStreetMap, 128 no longer worked: 61 domains no longer existed, 43 servers did not respond, 13 showed a parking or placeholder page and 11 an error. That is 21.8 percent. Another 31 sites refused our visit, through a firewall or a robots.txt rule.

Part of that reflects the map, which is not always kept up to date. But anyone who taps the link of a Belgian business on a map, in an app or a directory hits a dead page about one time in five.

Findable in Google: what is missing

Beyond the four basics, we looked at what helps Google show a site well.

• TitleAlmost every site has one, but half (49.9 percent) fall outside the 30 to 65 characters Google shows in full: often just the company name, or a long string of keywords.
• H128.8 percent have none, 21.3 percent more than one. Exactly one H1, as it should be, appears on half.
• Sitemap79.9 percent have one, usually generated by the platform.
• Local business schemaOnly 15.0 percent tell Google in structured data that they are a local business, with address and opening hours. Structured data of any kind appears on 57.1 percent.
• NoindexFive sites ask Google not to show their home page, probably a setting left over from development.

Our guide to technical SEO covers each of these, and the website not showing on Google tool walks through the usual causes.

Findable in AI assistants

More buyers now put their question to ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity. Belgian small businesses do not shut these assistants out, but they give them little to read.

Three of the 477 sites that responded block GPTBot; none block the crawlers that ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity use to search. The llms.txt file, a summary written for AI assistants, appears on 17.8 percent of sites, almost always because the platform adds it: Wix on 34 of its 35 sites, Shopify on all 14, against 11 of 169 WordPress sites. How to get named in AI answers is in how to get found in ChatGPT; the AI crawler checker shows whether your own site blocks AI bots.

Speed on a phone

The median site shows its main content after 1.8 seconds. 68.1 percent stay under the 2.5 seconds Google rates as good; 14.8 percent take more than 4 seconds. A home page weighs 2.3 MB at the median and loads 64 files; 39.6 percent weigh over 3 MB. Speed by sector and platform is in our companion study, page speed statistics for Belgium.

Cookies and trackers before consent

This is the biggest legal exposure. On 35.6 percent of sites an analytics or advertising service set a cookie or fired a pixel before we clicked anything: the Google Analytics cookie on 25.8 percent, the Meta pixel on 10.5 percent. Yet only 45.2 percent show a cookie banner. On 69 sites a tracker ran with no banner at all; on 83 there was a banner, but the tracker loaded before the choice.

Belgian law requires prior consent for non-essential cookies, with a reject-all button on the first layer, and the data protection authority makes no exception for analytics. If you are entering the Belgian market with your own site, check this first; see do I need a cookie banner.

Accessibility

We ran axe-core, the open checker also built into browser developer tools, on every home page against WCAG 2.1 level AA. 92.7 percent of sites have at least one issue axe rates as serious or critical.

An automated check finds only part of the problems, so the real number is higher. Since 28 June 2025, sites where consumers buy or book must be accessible under the European Accessibility Act, with a delay for micro-enterprises; see the European Accessibility Act.

Legal details and email

Every Belgian company must show its company number on its website. We found it on the home page or a legal page on 47.5 percent of sites; see company number on a website. We used those numbers for our Peppol count: 96.1 percent of those firms are on the Peppol network.

On 14.1 percent of sites the footer shows a year of 2024 or earlier, a small sign that nobody maintains the site. For email, 79.9 percent of domains publish an SPF record, but only 44.3 percent a DMARC record, and 12.4 percent a DMARC policy that actually stops spoofed mail.

By sector, region and platform

Business services (accountants, lawyers, insurers) and beauty and leisure lead on the basics at about 51 percent; construction and hospitality trail at about 38 percent. Automotive and hospitality load trackers before consent least often (26 and 29 percent of sites), business services most often (47 percent).

Flanders (44.9 percent) and Wallonia (46.8 percent) are close; Brussels trails at 35.6 percent. The smaller provinces have fewer than twenty sites each, so a gap of ten points there can still be chance.

The platform matters more than the sector. Of WordPress sites, 34.9 percent pass the basics, against 71.4 percent of Wix sites. The difference is the description: Wix asks for one when you create a page, while 45.6 percent of WordPress sites have none. WordPress is not worse, but it leaves more to the builder; see Wix or WordPress and custom website or WordPress.

Shopify (3.3 percent), Squarespace (2.8), Joomla (2.6), Odoo (2.1) and one.com (1.9) follow. For platforms with fewer than fifteen sites we give no shares per check; they would depend too much on chance.

What this means for a company selling into Belgium

• Choose search as your channelif you compete with local Belgian firms: more than half have not filled in the basics, so a site that has them stands out in a market with little search competition on content.
• Choose consent done rightbefore you launch. Over a third of local competitors load trackers before consent; that is a risk for them, not a standard to copy.
• Choose two languagesif you sell nationally. Flanders and Wallonia score alike on the basics; the market is split by language, not by quality.

If you want a site that has these basics on day one, in Dutch, French and English, see website design or book a call.

Method

Sample. There is no open list of Belgian business websites available without registration, so we started from OpenStreetMap, the open map where volunteers record businesses with their website. We took every shop, hospitality venue, healthcare practice, hairdresser, gym, office and trade business with its own domain: 31,123 domains. Chains, platforms and public bodies were removed. Per province we drew a random sample in proportion to population, taking the seven sectors in turn. OpenStreetMap over-represents shops and hospitality; weighting each sector equally makes a builder count as much as a café. Offices without a counter and sole traders without premises are less present on the map, so the sample leans towards businesses with customers at the door.

Measurement. Each site was visited with Chromium in a 390 by 844 pixel viewport, without network throttling, from a fixed line in Ghent. Load time is the Largest Contentful Paint reported by the browser. A tracker before consent means a cookie from an analytics or advertising service, or a request to an advertising pixel, before we clicked anything on the page. Accessibility was checked with axe-core against WCAG 2.1 A and AA. The platform was recognised from the code and headers of the home page.

Margin of error. With 427 working sites, the margin on a share around 50 percent is about 4.7 points either way; the basics figure of 44.5 percent lies between 39.9 and 49.2 percent with 95 percent confidence. Margins per sector and province are wider. We repeat the study every year.