Our first study of US small-business websites found that two in five could not be booked online at all, and that a quarter handed the booking to a platform. That second number deserved a closer look. Which platforms? Does it vary by trade? And were we counting a platform the business actually sends customers to, or any mention of one in the page?
So we went back to the 473 sites that had nothing bookable on their own pages and read each homepage again with a stricter test: a platform counts only if the page links to it or embeds it.
16.7% of them hand the job to a platform. The rest, five in six of the sites with nothing bookable of their own, hand it to nobody. The phone number is the booking system.
The stricter count moves the headline
| First count | This count | |
|---|---|---|
| Bookable or buyable on their own site | 32.3% | 32.3% |
| Hand the booking to a platform | 25.0% | about 11% |
| Cannot be booked online anywhere | 42.6% | about 56% |
The first pass matched a platform's name anywhere in the page source, which counted a site built on a shop platform as a site selling through one, and a script that happened to carry a platform's name as a booking link. This pass reads only the addresses a page links to or loads from. We think the stricter number is the right one, and the first study now says so.
By trade: restaurants and hotels hand it over, clinics and trades do not
Of the sites in each trade with nothing bookable on their own pages, the share that link to a platform, and the platforms they link to most:
| Trade | Link to a platform | Share | Most linked |
|---|---|---|---|
| Restaurants, cafes and bars | 20 of 57 | 35% | Toast (10) |
| Hotels and guesthouses | 11 of 33 | 33% | Hotels.com (8) |
| Gyms and studios | 17 of 93 | 18% | Mindbody (12) |
| Trades and workshops | 13 of 88 | 15% | Toast (6) |
| Hair and beauty | 8 of 72 | 11% | Zenoti, Vagaro (3 each) |
| Dentists and clinics | 9 of 109 | 8% | Zocdoc, Vrbo (2 each) |
| Hire and rentals | 0 of 15 | 0% | none found |
Restaurants and hotels are the trades the platforms reached first, and it shows: a third of the ones without their own ordering or booking page have somebody else's. Dentists and clinics are the striking row. 109 sites, 9 with a scheduling or directory link; the other hundred take appointments by phone, and the method counts every platform link a page carries, which is how a holiday-rental site shares the clinics' top spot with Zocdoc. Hire and rental businesses, the furthest behind in the first study, are furthest behind here too: none of the 15 link to anything. Trades is the one row where the platforms linked are ordering tools rather than scheduling ones; the category spans workshops that sell from a counter as well as businesses that come to you.
Which platforms
Of the 78 sites that link to a platform, 11 link to more than one. Counting every platform a site links to:
| Platform | Sites |
|---|---|
| Toast | 16 |
| Mindbody | 13 |
| Hotels.com | 8 |
| Square Online | 8 |
| Resy | 5 |
| Vagaro | 4 |
| DoorDash | 4 |
| Uber Eats | 3 |
| Zenoti | 3 |
| Grubhub | 3 |
Two things stand out. Toast and Square Online are not marketplaces; they are the restaurant's own ordering page hosted on the platform's domain, which is still a page the business does not own and still carries the platform's pricing. And OpenTable, the name most people would guess first for restaurant bookings, appears on 2 sites in the whole sample. The neighborhood restaurant without a reservations page is far more likely to be taking orders through Toast than tables through OpenTable.
By what the link does: 37 sites link to a scheduling tool, 24 to an ordering service, 15 to a marketplace or directory and 10 to a reservations system.
What it means if you run one of these businesses
The platforms are a reasonable way to be found by strangers, and most of the businesses here are not using them for that. They are using them as the booking book, for customers who already searched the business by name and landed on its own website, and then paying a cut on each one for the introduction that never happened.
That is the gap a booking or ordering page on your own site closes: the customer who found you by name books with you directly, and the platform keeps the job it is good at, which is the stranger. The bookings, online ordering and hire pages describe how that runs on a Webkio site, with payment going to your own account.
How we did it
The sites are the 473 from the first study flagged as having nothing bookable or buyable on their own homepage. Each was read once more, in November 2026, with an identifying user agent and three seconds between requests, and only the homepage was read. 6 could not be read this time. No business is named here; hosts are kept as hashes in the dataset.
A platform counts when its address appears in a link, an embed or a form action on the page, matched against a list of 59 booking, ordering, scheduling and marketplace services across the seven trades. A mention in text, a script that merely carries a platform's name, and the site builder a page is hosted on do not count. That is the whole difference from the first pass, and it is why the platform row fell from a quarter to about 11%.
What this still cannot see: a booking widget injected by a script whose address does not name the platform, and anything behind a second click. Both would undercount platform use, so the true platform share sits somewhere between this count and the first one, closer to this one.
FAQ
What share of small businesses send bookings to a third-party platform?
In this re-read of 467 US small-business sites with nothing bookable on their own pages, 16.7% link to a booking, ordering, scheduling or marketplace platform. Set against all 699 sites in the original study, that is about 11%, with about 56% bookable nowhere online at all.
Which booking platforms do small businesses use most?
Among the sites that link to one: Toast and Mindbody lead, then Hotels.com and Square Online, then Resy, Vagaro and DoorDash. OpenTable appears on 2 of 467 sites.
Why is this number lower than the first study's 25%?
The first pass counted a platform's name anywhere in the page source. This pass counts only links, embeds and form actions, so a site built on a shop platform no longer counts as selling through one. The stricter test is the better one and the first study now carries a note pointing here.
Can I cite these numbers?
Yes, with a link to this page and the date. They were measured in November 2026 on the same sample as the first study, and the method is above.