Belgian cities ranked: 95 of 107 can't be told apart from the country

Of the 107 Belgian municipalities with at least 50 working local business websites, 95 were not clearly above or below the national score in November 2026. We measured 23,676 sites on six criteria. Place 37, Halle, could just as well be anywhere from 11 to 77, so read each place with its interval.

What place 37 actually tells you

Belgium has 565 municipalities, and most small businesses think in those units: the town hall, the local paper, the shopping street. Each municipality here gets a score from 0 to 100, the plain average of six percentages. The six are a tap-to-call button on a phone, a mobile layout, a fast start page, local structured data, AI crawlers left unblocked, and buying or booking online. The country as a whole scores 65.4.

A town with 60 sites is a small sample. Swap a few businesses and its place moves by dozens. So we redrew the sites within each municipality 2,000 times, and the middle 95 percent of the resulting places is the interval.

Halle sits at place 37, with an interval from 11 to 77. For half of the municipalities the interval spans at least 81 places. Out of 5,671 pairs of municipalities, 98.0 percent have overlapping intervals and can't be told apart. Only 13 pairs have at least 100 sites each, no overlap and a gap of at least 5 points. Bruges against Kortrijk is one: 68.4 against 63.4, with intervals 4 to 36 and 48 to 102.

8 municipalities have their whole score interval above the country: Middelkerke, Tongeren-Borgloon, Braine-l’Alleud, Nieuwpoort, Waterloo, Bruges, Ghent and City of Brussels. 4 have it below: Eupen, Anderlecht, Oupeye and Hoogstraten. The rest show no clear difference. Even the ends of the list stay uncertain. Middelkerke at place 1 could be as low as 49, and Hoogstraten at place 107 could be as high as 91.

How much of the list is chance

Every list has a first and a last, even with nothing behind it. We tested that directly. We shuffled all sites across municipalities 1,000 times, within their own sector, and rebuilt the whole list each time. That gives the spread municipalities get from chance alone.

The measured spread of the score is 2.1 points; chance alone gives 1.9. The top municipality scores 70.3, while the top of a shuffled list averages 71.1. Chance also puts about 6 municipalities above and 2 below the country. We saw 8 and 4, within what chance can produce (10 and 5). We put the real spread between municipalities at about 0.8 point out of 100.

The same test per municipality gives 13 below the usual 5 percent threshold, where chance alone predicts 5.4. After correcting for 107 tests at once, none remain.

The spread is the standard deviation between municipalities, in percentage points. Municipalities do differ on single measures, speed excepted. Those differences largely cancel in the score because the measures don't move together: the average rank correlation between two measures is 0.1 on a scale up to 1.

Six measures, six different leaders

Since the score flattens so much, single measures are more useful than the final place. Below are the highest and lowest municipality on each measure, among those with at least 100 sites, as raw shares. An extreme in such a list always overstates a little, because it is the place where chance fell one way. On speed the spread is no larger than chance, so that row mostly shows chance.

Drop one measure from the score and 6 to 10 of the top ten stay. The order depends on what you measure. The sector correction matters too: on the raw score, 7 of the ten stay.

The call button has the widest spread. On a phone, a linked number takes one tap, and the 48.3 percent of sites without one ask the customer to retype it. Our mobile study breaks that down by sector.

Twenty big cities against everyone else

Before seeing any result we fixed twenty big cities: the thirteen Flemish regional centres, the City of Brussels, and Liège, Charleroi, Namur, Mons, La Louvière and Tournai. They hold 7,087 sites, against 16,589 elsewhere.

Cities lead on buying or booking online: 54.1 against 48.2 percent, after correcting for sector mix. On the other five measures and on the total score the gap stays under our 5-point threshold, so we call those about equal.

Gaps are calculated before rounding.

The cities themselves spread over the whole list. La Louvière has fewer than 50 working sites in the frame, so it gets no place.

Even Antwerp (1,217 sites) and Ghent (1,297), the two municipalities with the most sites, keep intervals of 41 and 32 places. Why cities sell online more often, this measurement can't say.

Where buying online does differ

Belgium has three regions, and on buying or booking online a clear line runs through them: 51.8 percent in Flanders against 43.3 in Wallonia, on 14,749 and 5,039 readable sites. Brussels has 46.4 percent on the call button against 52.6 in Flanders, yet 23.9 against 18.3 on local data. All of these use the same sector mix.

Provinces show the same pattern. In East Flanders you can buy or book on 53.9 percent of sites, in the province of Liège on 41.7. On the call button West Flanders has 56.6 percent and Flemish Brabant 49.1.

Percentages are corrected for sector mix. The names are the highest places per province, and their intervals usually overlap with their neighbours'. Full counts per measure are in the CSV.

Why we correct for sector

A seaside town full of restaurants and a town full of accountants can't be compared without a correction. On buying or booking online, the gap between sectors is larger than between any two provinces.

So every municipality's score uses the same national sector mix. A sector with fewer than 5 sites in a municipality is filled up with the national percentage. The CSV also has the raw score and raw place. Both lists run closely together, with a rank correlation of 0.9 on a scale up to 1. The sector table shows raw percentages.

All 107 places with their intervals

Read each row with its interval. The last column says whether the municipality's score sits clearly above or below the country. Brussels here means the City of Brussels, one of the nineteen municipalities of the region. Names follow common English usage, or the French name in Wallonia and Brussels.

What a business owner can do with this

Your place says little about your own site. You can check that in half an hour on the same six points.

1. Call button. Open your start page on a phone and tap your number. If nothing happens, link it with `tel:`. The mobile study has the other phone checks.
2. Local data. Add name, address and opening hours as schema markup, with LocalBusiness or a subtype. Organization alone doesn't count as local data in this measurement. These local SEO tips cover the rest, and local SEO is how we work on it.
3. Buying or booking. Let customers book if your business allows it, with a booking system or an online store if it pays off. For an accountant or a builder it often doesn't fit, and that is no failure.
4. Speed. Run the speed test, then remove the biggest brake with this guide.
5. AI crawlers. Use the AI crawler checker to see whether your robots.txt blocks anything you didn't mean to. If your site doesn't show up at all, start with this check.
6. New site? Read what a website costs first. How we build websites is on that page.

What existed and how this fits

We found no list of Belgian municipalities by the websites of their businesses. The employers' group UNIZO has a Digital Scan a business fills in about itself. In the Netherlands, MKB-Nederland ran an election of the most small-business-friendly municipality every two years, on the local business climate, not on websites.

This study uses the same frame as our earlier measurements, so figures should line up. In the mobile study, 48.2 percent of 21,973 sites had no callable number; here 51.7 percent have one, after removing 22 company numbers linked as phone numbers. Local data sits at the same 19.1 percent. Mobile layout is higher here (97.2 against 96.5 percent) because we also count a viewport tag without quotes. In the AI crawler study, 3.1 percent of 23,676 sites blocked a crawler, the same figure as 96.9 percent open.

Speed means something else here than in the page speed study: there the largest element in a browser on 426 sites, here the full HTML on all sites. The Ghent study (200 sites) and the national small business study (586 sites) use different samples and checks, so don't compare those directly.

Which municipality we mean after the mergers

On 1 January 2025, 28 Flemish municipalities became 13. We use the boundaries of that day. Melle is part of Merelbeke-Melle, Borsbeek of Antwerp, Wachtebeke of Lochristi, Moerbeke of Lokeren and Kortessem of Hasselt. Old names get no number of their own. A business in Melle counts towards all of Merelbeke-Melle, and we have no figure for Melle alone.