The Nordic website gap, measured trade by trade

Painters and carpenters do sit high on this table. An accountant and a dentist sit higher.

Of 610 dentists on Maps in Norway, 285 carry no website field.

A dental clinic is a fitted-out business with staff, a booking book and a waiting room.

Yet almost half of them are invisible to anyone who searches outside Maps.

The only Norwegian trade with a wider gap is accountants. 51% of 851 have no site.

Across all four countries, 6,111 of 23,846 businesses have none. That is 26%.

That spread is the point. A trade is not a market. A trade in one country is a market.

• Norway — 2,870 of 9,632 have no site, which is 30%
• Sweden — 1,213 of 6,404 have no site, which is 19%
• Denmark — 1,094 of 3,927 have no site, which is 28%
• Finland — 934 of 3,883 have no site, which is 24%

Norway sits 11 points above Sweden. Same region, same phones, same Google.

We do not read this as a story about wealth. We read it as a story about who sells websites where.

Our guess is agency density. Sweden's web trade reached the small end of the market first.

That is a guess and we label it as one. Maps data can show a gap. It cannot show a cause.

• Norwegian accountants — 51% of 851 have no site
• Norwegian dentists — 47% of 610 have no site
• Norwegian painters — 45% of 247 have no site
• Danish accountants — 44% of 224 have no site
• Finnish dentists — 43% of 274 have no site
• Finnish accountants — 40% of 156 have no site
• Norwegian hair salons — 40% of 694 have no site
• Norwegian carpenters — 39% of 565 have no site
• Norwegian cleaning companies — 38% of 250 have no site
• Danish physiotherapists — 38% of 357 have no site

Accountants and dentists take the top of this table. Both are office trades with trained staff.

Painters come third and carpenters eighth. The trade you would guess first is not first.

And the narrowest

• Swedish opticians — 5% of 300 have no site
• Norwegian opticians — 6% of 271 have no site
• Norwegian pharmacies — 7% of 259 have no site
• Danish opticians — 7% of 229 have no site
• Swedish driving schools — 8% of 252 have no site
• Swedish veterinary clinics — 8% of 168 have no site

Opticians sit lowest in all four countries we hold them in.

Pharmacies, driving schools and vet clinics sit down there too.

The pattern is chains. A trade run by chains has a site because head office bought one.

A trade run by owner-operators does not. That is the whole finding in one line.

• Accountants — 1,429 of them in all four countries, and 46% have no site
• Dentists — 1,549 of them in all four countries, and 38% have no site
• Carpenters — 1,106 of them in three countries, and 36% have no site
• Painters — 779 of them in three countries, and 36% have no site
• Estate agencies — 1,057 of them in all four countries, and 33% have no site
• Physiotherapists — 902 of them in three countries, and 32% have no site
• Travel agencies — 652 of them in three countries, and 32% have no site
• Law firms — 871 of them in three countries, and 31% have no site
• Hair salons — 1,715 of them in all four countries, and 31% have no site
• Plumbers — 778 of them in two countries, and 28% have no site
• Electricians — 1,517 of them in all four countries, and 25% have no site
• Cleaning companies — 522 of them in two countries, and 25% have no site
• Hairdressers — 529 of them in two countries, and 25% have no site
• Photographers — 1,164 of them in all four countries, and 24% have no site
• Florists — 615 of them in three countries, and 24% have no site
• Bookkeepers — 470 of them in two countries, and 21% have no site
• Beauty salons — 1,290 of them in all four countries, and 20% have no site
• Bakeries — 732 of them in three countries, and 17% have no site
• Chiropractors — 727 of them in two countries, and 16% have no site
• Roofing contractors — 897 of them in all four countries, and 15% have no site
• Driving schools — 824 of them in three countries, and 14% have no site
• Restaurants — 646 of them in three countries, and 13% have no site
• Gyms — 941 of them in three countries, and 13% have no site
• Car rental agencies — 244 of them in one country, and 11% have no site
• Veterinary clinics — 605 of them in three countries, and 11% have no site
• Pharmacies — 259 of them in one country, and 7% have no site
• Opticians — 1,026 of them in all four countries, and 7% have no site

Dentists come out at 38% across four countries, on 1,549 listings.

Opticians come out at 7% on 1,026. The two ends of the same high street.

Where the data comes from

Public Google Maps business listings in Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland.

We crawl the listing itself. We do not buy a panel and we do not model a national total.

Only open listings count. Anything Maps marks as permanently closed drops out.

When we collected it

The counts on this page come from the pass that finished on 26 July 2026.

We re-crawl on a rolling schedule, so these figures move. Cite the date with the number.

What "no website" means

The Maps listing carries no website field. Nothing more and nothing less.

We do not judge the site. A one-page site from 2011 counts as having a website here.

We do not follow the link to see if it loads. That is a separate study and a harder one.

How big the sample is

23,846 listings across 27 trades and four countries.

Each trade sits inside one country in the table. The smallest of those pairs holds 152 listings.

We publish no pair under that. A share drawn from forty rows is noise with a percent sign.

• A firm with no website may run a busy Facebook page instead. Maps does not always show that.
• Our index is not a census. It covers the trades we crawl, not every firm in the country.
• Trade coverage differs by country, so a country total leans on the trades we hold there.
• A listing is not a company. One firm with three branches shows up three times.
• A missing website field can mean the owner never filled it in, not that no site exists.
• We count what Maps shows on the day. An owner who adds a site tomorrow moves the number.

The fourth point is the one we would push hardest on if we were reading this.

Chains inflate a record count and pull a website share down at the same time.

Which is why the trade tables above matter more than the country totals.

We think the direction of every finding here holds. We would not bet on the second decimal.

Take the numbers. They are free to quote, chart or reprint.

We ask one thing back. Link to this page as the source.

Want the raw table as a file? Ask us and we will send it.

Reach us through the contact details on the about page.