Bad Website Finder — local businesses with broken, dated, or invisible sites

Give it a city. Get back a ranked list of local businesses whose website is actually broken — with the owner's phone number and a one-line description of what is wrong that you can read out on a cold call.

Every site in the output was fetched and checked. Nothing is inferred from a directory listing, and nothing is guessed.

Who this is for

Web designers, agencies, and freelancers who sell websites. The hard part of that business is not building sites, it is finding someone who needs one and knows it. This gives you a list of people whose site is demonstrably failing.

It works because demonstrable beats persuasive. "You need a new website" is an opinion the owner can argue with. "Your site shows a Not Secure warning on your customers' phones, here, look" is a fact they can check while you are standing there.

Also used by: local SEO consultants, hosting resellers, and anyone doing territory research before a sales push.

What it checks

Each site is fetched and scored. Higher score = worse site = better prospect.

Finding	Score	Why it matters
Dead domain (DNS does not resolve)	40	Nothing loads at all
Domain parked / listed for sale	40	They lost the registration
No HTTPS at all	+8	Every visitor sees a "Not Secure" warning
Not mobile-friendly (no viewport tag)	+5	Phones render the desktop layout, zoomed out
Uses Flash	+5	Dead since 2020
Table-based layout	+4	Pre-2010 markup
Site error (404/500/TLS failure)	6	Broken, worth a look
No HTTPS by default	+3	Missing redirect — minor but sloppy
Almost no content (<2.5 KB)	+3	A placeholder, not a website
No structured data	+2	No hours or call button in Google's panel
No tap-to-call link	+2	Phone number is not clickable
Slow (>4s)	+2	Visitors leave
No page title	+2	Shows the raw URL in search results
DIY builder page (Wix/Weebly/GoDaddy)	+1	Often an abandoned trial

Healthy sites are excluded by default — a business with a good website is not a prospect. Flip includeHealthySites on if you want a full census instead.

Sample output

Real rows from a run over Burbank, Inglewood, and Tulare, California:

score	name	type	phone	problems
40	Soo Raa Thai-American	restaurant	+1-818-505-8216	dead domain — search the name, they may have moved
40	Jack's Family Kitchen	restaurant	+1 323-296-5215	domain PARKED/FOR SALE — search the name
12	Media City Auto Repair	car repair	+1-818-842-5757	NO HTTPS AT ALL (browsers show 'Not Secure'); table-based layout (pre-2010)
12	Los Amigos Bar & Grill	restaurant	+1 818-842-3700	not mobile-friendly; no HTTPS by default (missing redirect); no structured data for Google; no tap-to-call link
9	The Magnolia Grille	restaurant	+1 818-766-8698	not mobile-friendly; no structured data for Google; no tap-to-call link

One full record:

{
  "score": 12,
  "verdict": "problems",
  "name": "Media City Auto Repair",
  "category": "car repair",
  "phone": "+1-818-842-5757",
  "website": "http://mediacityauto.com",
  "problems": [
    "NO HTTPS AT ALL (browsers show 'Not Secure')",
    "table-based layout (pre-2010)"
  ],
  "problems_text": "NO HTTPS AT ALL (browsers show 'Not Secure'); table-based layout (pre-2010)",
  "street_address": "329 North Victory Boulevard",
  "city": "Burbank",
  "searched_place": "Burbank, California",
  "latitude": 34.1766098,
  "longitude": -118.3184194,
  "http_status": 200,
  "final_url": "http://mediacityauto.com",
  "load_seconds": 0.31,
  "page_bytes": 100336,
  "fetch_error": "",
  "osm_id": 4504065891
}

Export as JSON, CSV, or Excel, or pull it from the API.

Input

Field	What it does
Cities or neighbourhoods	One per line. Be specific — Burbank, California, not Burbank. Sweep a whole metro in one run.
Business categories	Food, beauty, trades, health, retail, insurance, professional. Leave empty for all.
Search radius	Kilometres from the centre of each place. 4 km ≈ a neighbourhood, 15 km ≈ a small city.
Max sites per place	Caps the cost of a run.
Minimum problem score	0 = anything with a flaw, 5 = serious only, 40 = dead and parked domains only.
Include healthy sites	Off by default.
Include sites that blocked the check	Off by default — see below.

Two things worth knowing before you call anyone

A dead domain does not mean the business has no website. It means that domain is gone. In testing, three of four dead domains belonged to businesses that had simply rebuilt somewhere else and left a stale listing behind. Search the business name before you pitch — it costs you one search and saves you an embarrassing phone call. The same applies to parked domains.

Some sites block automated checks. They return a 403 to anything that is not a human, and spot-checking showed they usually open fine in a real browser. Reporting those as broken would send you to pitch someone whose website is perfectly good, so they are excluded by default and labelled inconclusive if you turn them on. Turning on Apify Proxy reduces how often this happens.

Where the data comes from

Business listings come from OpenStreetMap — free, open, and worldwide, with no API key and no per-record fee. That is why this Actor is cheap to run.

The trade-off is honest: OSM coverage varies. Dense urban areas are well mapped; small towns are thin. A business is only included if a contributor recorded a website for it, so the count you get back is not every business in town. Chains are filtered out where OpenStreetMap tags them as such, but a franchise that nobody tagged will occasionally slip through.

Where the platform allows it, results for each area are cached for 30 days within your own account, so re-running the same area skips the lookup entirely — faster for you, and easier on a service that runs on donations. If caching is unavailable the run simply queries fresh; nothing fails.

Coverage

Anywhere OpenStreetMap has data, which is everywhere. Coverage is strongest in North America and Europe.